Kings of the Hill, at the Foot of a Mountain

While Exulting in Top-Dog Status, Students Glance Nervously Toward Their Future: High School

One in an occasional series looking at learning in the middle and high school years

Ask teenagers Laura Hoyos and William Wacker, Lee Kussmann and Laurence Norman, what eighth grade is about, and they will detail the obvious: taking harder classes, facing a slew of standardized tests and preparing for the college countdown in high school.

But give them a minute, and out comes what it really means to be in eighth grade today at Langston Hughes Middle School in Reston:

"We are finding out what kind of people we are, who we want to be," said Lee, 14.

"It's really when you start thinking about your future," said Laura, 14.

And that, the students said, means adopting a more serious attitude about schoolwork, wrestling with full-flowering hormones and negotiating peer pressure. What friends think often becomes more important; what parents want, less so.

"You are expected to be more independent, more responsible for your individual self," said Laurence, 15, adding, with a sly smile: "Not everybody is."

Once stuck squarely in the middle of junior high, eighth grade has taken on new importance as the end of the modern middle-school experience, which begins in sixth grade for most students, educators say. It is the gateway to the super-charged, high-school experience.

"They are jumping off to another world," said Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and president of the nonprofit Alliance for Excellence Education. "And that's the world of heavy content courses, where if you don't have the fundamentals down, you are in great peril."

Confident, often rambunctious and brutally honest, eighth-graders present adults with a jumble of appearances. They want to be challenged, said teacher Jennet Ballinger of Dubois Middle School in Dubois, Wyo., and they "have a desire to make a difference." One-on-one, they can be sensitive and kind; when they are "in a pack," she said, they can be mean. They can be delightful and difficult.

"This is such a great age," said James Albright, Langston Hughes's middle school program coordinator. "They are still cheerful enough that it is a pleasure to be in the classroom with them. They are not jaded. But they are ready to have serious conversations."

For many students, eighth grade is a year of contradictions.