The New Kids: Highlighting the experiences of new Friends at BFS
New. While it is defined as “not existing before” by the Oxford Dictionary, it means different things to different people. For some of my freshman peers, “new” means a new building, new teachers, new faces. “New” might mean a new PE program, a new game you and your friends obsess over for like a week. But what about a new school?
Change
Our brains are hardwired to find and love patterns, and when these patterns get messed up, it’s registered as a threat by a part of our brain called the amygdala. It controls emotions like fear, aggression, and fight-or-flight reactions. It fires up, for example, when you suddenly get stressed out when you mess up one part of your morning routine. This is all a long way of saying that our bodies don’t like change at all. Small changes often aren’t enough to trigger this response, but what about much more extreme stuff, like a new school?
The Nitty Gritty
All of this is to say that moving schools is an incredible challenge for many students. Studies have found that students making a structural move from schools, for example from middle school to high school, perform significantly worse than their integrated peers in both ELA and math in the short and medium term (Schwartz et al., 2017). Essentially, a lot of new students have a harder time adjusting to the curriculum than other students, but this is to be expected. However, depending on other factors, such as how far the student lives from school and their life outside of school, this could last for even longer than expected.
Special Guest
All of this research is incredibly important, but also abstract. What does Schwartz know about Brooklyn Friends? Luckily, I was able to get my hands on one of the new students here. Our guest of honor was one of my peers, who preferred to remain anonymous. Interestingly, their experience at Brooklyn Friends has been an easy transition. They enjoy most of their classes and other activities and their academics are in strong standing. This probably doesn’t go against Schwartz’s research but is more a testament to how easy it is to integrate into Brooklyn Friends as a new student.
The End?
So after learning that our own brains work against us, some dude named Schwartz and his friends found new students do worse than average, and then proving that incorrect in the only space this article will ever be read in…what was the point? Brooklyn Friends, from my experience and the experience of others, has been an incredibly welcoming place. I wrote this just to remind us that although it may not be apparent, new students have only had a month or so of school. Everything is still new. So as I end the article, I remind you to give grace to your new colleagues, new peers, and new friends.
