02-23-02

Washington Post

Alpha Girl; In Middle School, Learning to Handle The ABCs of Power


By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer

The seventh-grade alpha female slides a size-zero body into her designated spot in the school cafeteria, her perfect blond hair swinging across her shoulders like a 1960s Breck girl's. A half-dozen ladies-in-waiting assume seats around her as she leans over to whisper something to her favorite of the moment.

Whitney Bullock, seated at a another seventh-grade table several rows away, takes it all in with a grimace.

"Do you see how she cups her hand around her mouth so when she talks?" Whitney asks, mimicking the hand gesture she knows well. "That means she's talking about someone, saying something that probably is not very nice."

Whitney, of the broad shoulders and wiry black hair, has been snubbed more than once by this girl. If you're a woman reading this, you can feel her pain.

If you're a man, you probably don't have a clue.

With all the debate among professionals over girls as victims, very few people talk about this: In middle school, girls have the only power that counts at that moment, social power. These alphas -- named after the first letter in the Greek alphabet -- are the brightest stars in their constellation, defining life as the young teen knows it. They decide that American Eagle shirts are what you wear with jeans, Dasani water is what you drink at lunch, Jen is persona non grata at their lunchroom table and Brittany must ask Adam to Courtney's party.

They hang over guys at school and telephone guys at home at night, becoming increasingly direct as they get older. Girl or guy, you don't dare get in their way because they can slice you up with a word or a look. Kids both rely on and resent them, and primatologist Jane Goodall would spot them in a minute.

Although alpha females can be found among many species in many habitats, Goodall was one of the first scientists to identify them among chimpanzees in Tanzania. She shocked gender theorists in the 1960s with the finding that some female chimps kill the young of other females in an effort to maintain their dominant position in the troops.

Since then, primate experts have discovered females among other ape types who lead by cooperation rather than intimidation -- the bonobos, for example. In any middle school cafeteria today you'll see examples of this type also, and there's some reason to believe these girls are on the rise. But let's stick with alphas for the moment.

Alphas have been around forever, assuming their thrones based on beauty, dress, family or sheer force of personality. Back when girls didn't or couldn't compete with boys in the classroom and on the playing field, pubescent alpha females learned at their mother's knee a roundabout route to power that they then passed on to their daughters. Hollywood captured them on-screen in movies such as "Heathers" in 1989 and 1997's "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion."

What we most remember is their power to exclude.

Lauren Kepple, a freshman at American University, knew a girl named Stephanie in fifth grade. "I had just been moved into a class for gifted kids and was assigned a locker next to Stephanie's," she recalls. "She said something that made me feel I was not good enough."

Alphas, she says, "zero in on your biggest failing. If you have weight issues, they'll go right to your weight."

Lauren's friend Meredith McGloin, another AU student, says, "I've never seen guys be so cruel." Her reaction to the alpha girls in middle school? "To go off in my corner and read books. I was going to shut them out before they shut me out."

Goritza Ninova, 16, recently moved to Northern Virginia from Bulgaria and knows all about alphas. Sipping cappuccino at the Pentagon City Mall, dressed in a zipped-up cardigan, jeans and chunky black shoes from her native country, she describes the alphas there, starting at age 11 or so.

"They wear tight jeans, tight, low-cut shirts and lots of makeup. When they walk by a guy, they move their butts just so. They think they can get anything or anyone they want." There's a Bulgarian word for them, she says: tarikatka. In Bulgaria, a tarikatka went after Goritza's boyfriend. "She was so self-confident. I was scared," Goritza recalls. Fortunately, "she scared my boyfriend as well."

Girls flout the wishes of an alpha at their peril. Tegan Hendrickson, a senior at Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, fell out of favor with Jenny in seventh grade. Before she knew it, Jenny's friends started a whisper campaign that Tegan, who liked to wear black clothes, was a Satanist.

"People would come up to me and tell me to go to hell, then laugh," she remembers. "I'd say, 'Been there. Done that. Want a reference?' It was pretty cruel."

Betas

Tegan is a beta, and no one knows an alpha like a beta, the second Greek letter, the second-brightest star. Betas usually make better grades than alphas. They run faster in track and play a sweet violin. Parents tell them they're wonderful just the way they are, even if they don't think they're as pretty as the alphas. Teachers tell them their personalities are changing, that the label that applies to them right now may not apply next year or the year after that.

All they want to be in middle school, however, is an alpha. Whitney Bullock is an example.

This is Whitney's first year at E.H. Marsteller, a Manassas school of 1,000 students in grades six through eight. Arriving a year after everyone else was difficult, especially during lunchtime, the main event each day.

"I'd head over to one table and see one of the popular girls and think, 'Oh, I better not sit there. I might say something stupid.' Then I'd head toward another and the same thing would happen."

Finally, at her brother's school's football game, she found a classmate she thought would be a friend.

She and the girl were the only kids from Marsteller. They shared a slice of pizza. At school the following Monday, Whitney approached her girl in a hall between classes with a big smile.

"Hi!" she said. The girl, standing with some other girls, mumbled a greeting and turned back to her friends. Whitney got the message and slid away.

Undeterred, she sought out the girl at the next several Saturday games, and again, the girl couldn't have been more friendly. They continued to share food on the bleachers, and Whitney met the girl's family. On school days, however, she got the cold shoulder, occasionally accompanied by a glare.

"She made made me feel really self-conscious about who I am," Whitney says.

Alphas have a way of doing that, their smugness often mistaken for self-esteem. Recently in music class, another popular girl asked if she could cheat off Whitney's paper during a test. Whitney, stalling, asked her why she wanted to.

"Because I'm really good at it," the girl replied.

"It took me a while to say no," Whitney says. "The thought kept running through my head that if I say yes, she'll like me and maybe I'll be popular." Whitney turned her down, and later a friend heard the girl bragging that she had cheated off Whitney's paper anyway.

Whitney admits she's done some things to try to fit in with the alphas. She has cussed like they do (not in front of her teachers, of course; a beta would never do that). When alphas say something about someone, she acts as if she knows what they're talking about even though she doesn't have a clue. At home she has a closet full of shirts that, until recently, she didn't wear because she was afraid the alphas wouldn't like them.

But after her experience on the football bleachers, she took out a couple of those shirts to wear. The more she watched the alphas, the more it seemed they didn't care about the things she did, and she realized that she cared about things like her reputation and her grades.

She tells herself that she learned from the girl who shunned her. "Now I'm careful whom I'm friends with. I won't change myself just so someone will like me."

Who is that self? The beta thinks about that question a lot. On some mornings before school, Whitney stands in front of a mirror and, following the advice of a teen magazine, tries to come up with five things she likes about herself. When telling this story, she can think of three.

"I have power inside," she says, "but it's hard for me to see it as clearly in myself as I see it in other girls."

Just wait a few years, Tegan Hendrickson would tell Whitney from her vantage point of five more years. Tegan is president of Wootton's film club, which nominated her for the Miss Wootton contest this month, a spoof on Miss America designed to raise money. She didn't make it to the finals -- betas rarely do -- and was a bit put out, but not overly so. She has come to terms with the fact that she is different from a lot of the girls at Wootton.

She loves Latin and history and musicals. She uses big words when she speaks, her conversation pouring forth as rapidly as white water. She wears her hair short and dyed red.

It's not that alphas don't bother her. This year several of them moved into her area, drama, acting superior to the crew and to those in each cast who don't play starring roles.

"This one girl acts like she's always right and can do no wrong. She bosses us around when we're working, then avoids us out of class. It's really irksome," she says. "They get this whole attitude thing when they don't get their way."

Betas such as Tegan know something the alphas don't, something the betas learn from their mothers. Alphas can flame out eventually. The cheerleader may marry the quarterback, but five years later she either dumps him or gets dumped and goes to work as a night-shift cashier at Swill-Mart. Meanwhile, the lesser stars learn to fly airplanes and practice law.

Gammas

Along the way, betas may evolve into the third type of girl, a girl who rules based not on what she appears to be but on what she does. This girl isn't easily labeled because her role is changing as women's roles change. We'll call her a gamma, the third letter of the Greek alphabet, known in science as being one of three or more closely related chemical substances. The designation seems appropriate because productive and task-oriented relationship-building is one thing that distinguishes gammas from alphas.

"They're someone everyone says is a friend," says AU student Lauren Kepple.

Older women remember this type, though there weren't as many gammas in earlier generations as there are now. Gammas used to be the student council vice president and co-editor of the yearbook. Nowadays, they are elected president and vice president, assisted by other gammas who crank out the election posters. They have influence onstage and off, and, thanks to the new world order that followed Title IX, they know they don't have to manipulate and posture to acquire it.

They've watched their sisters graduate from Princeton, their moms go to work and television's Buffy slay vampires. They've seen Mia Hamm kick a soccer ball and Reese Witherspoon graduate from Harvard in the popular movie "Legally Blonde," befriending everyone along the way.

They are careful listeners, easy to talk to and laugh with, and Jessi Reedy, one of Whitney Bullock's classmates at Marsteller, is practicing to be one. "I jump from group to group," she says. "At lunch, I'll just grab a couple of kids to sit with. If I see someone sitting by herself, I'll usually go up to her."

It's not that gammas don't like being center stage. Jessi admits she loved the notice she received for wearing a watch to school that she had gotten from a package of Lucky Charms cereal. "I'm expected to do things like that," she says, having an alpha moment.

Yet gammas characteristically talk about activities they're doing for others, not for themselves. Alpha power "is all about me," says Abbey Race, student government president at Marsteller. "Leadership is about representing something or someone else."

Gammas start coming into their own in high school, and one of the first things they learn is that it's not easy to cultivate leadership and stay agreeable.

Donna Lin, a gamma senior athlete at Rockville's Wootton, says that back in first grade, she was the kid in her neighborhood who would say, "Let's go outside and play," and everyone did. Now she has to choose her words carefully. In volleyball at Wootton, a sport at which she shines, "if someone was playing badly, I don't think I'd say, 'You suck.' I'd probably say something like, 'It looks like you're tired, but I know you can do this.' "

They love details, these gammas, and plan circles around anyone else, including the boys. Exhibit A is Wootton's senior planning committee. It's made up of 27 students chosen by their teachers: four boys and 23 girls.

Senior Brian Footer, who isn't on the committee, suspects he knows why it is so overwhelmingly female.

"These girls are goal-oriented and headstrong," he says. "Guys are lazy, I guess, or they don't care, or they're not thinking about that stuff yet."

Mix alphas and gammas together, as school organizations like Wootton's senior committee inevitably do, and it sometimes can be hard to tell the difference between the two. These girls are still, after all, trying on different selves like they would new clothes.

At one point in a meeting just days before the Miss Wootton contest, three girls on the committee had their hands up, two girls were talking at one time and senior class President Joyce Fu, a slightly built, soft-spoken girl, stood silently at the lectern. Committee members have been known to yell at one another, even make one another cry.

The burden on the gamma can be heavy. Another gamma, Kristin Smart, president of Wootton's student council, sympathizes with Joyce. "Some girls just don't know when to stop," she says. At student council meetings, "I sometimes feel like a kindergarten teacher having to separate the children."

Wootton Principal Rebecca Newman has no tolerance for such behavior at the 2,000-student school. "You're the role models for this school," she tells student leaders. "You better do it right, because if you don't, I'm in your face."

You wouldn't know it now by looking at Newman, an outspoken, power-suited lead dog, but she started life as a beta. Adopted by loving but extremely poor parents, she says she spent most of her kindergarten year under her teacher's desk, hiding from the rest of the kids.

Maybe that's why she has a special place in her heart for gammas who are cultivating their own brand of power. She has worked hard to move them beyond personality, hiring faculty members who encourage them to take science and play sports. Girls now make up half of Wootton's science classes and half of the athletes, she says with pride. Last year, the largely female senior leadership produced an outdoor rock festival that raised $ 25,000 so that a dying boy could visit Australia.

Yet too many Wootton girls still don't understand that lasting power comes from paying attention to issues of substance, she says. In other words, there are too many alphas.

For those girls, she says, "it's still who you're dating, or who said something cutting to whom. We've got to move beyond that, get them to see there is so much more."


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04-22-02

Billings (MT) Gazette

City Teacher Honored for High-Tech Changes"


By JOHN FITZGERALD Of The Gazette Staff

He was really just doing his job, but someone - he doesn't know who - nominated him for an international award and gosh darn it if he didn't win.

Robert Wennerberg, a technology teacher at Riverside Middle School, has received the Program Excellence Award from the International Technology Education Association. The award is the culmination of 10 years of improving and changing the technology curriculum at Riverside.

Wennerberg has moved the classes away from the traditional metal and woodworking shop classes to include computer technology and hands-on building techniques.

"We still do a little bit of welding and work with the cutting torch, but not as much as we used to do," he said.

Wennerberg uses three classrooms: the metalworking shop, the woodworking shop and, perhaps most important, the computer lab. In the computer lab, he has set up 14 computers using a variety of programs that run the gamut from word processing to Web-page design to Powerpoint to bridge-building applications.

"We've moved more from the industrial aspect to the technological aspect, where the kids have to use more problem-solving skills," he says.

Wennerberg's philosophy is to give the students a taste of a variety of topics, "and then, if they like it, they can hit it at a vo-tech or at high school."

The class is required for seventh-graders. They get a quarter of computer education and a quarter of technical education. The class is an elective for eighth-graders, who can work both in the shops and in the computer lab.

"The tech classes are always packed," said Michael Smith, Riverside's principal. "Kids are always seeking to get into those classes."

Smith has his ideas about why the classes are so popular:

"They get to do a lot of hands-on things. Kids really get to dig in and understand not only how the computer works itself but also how to use new programs and make them work.

"(Wennerberg) is always looking to add new programs and modify the ones he has developed. Any piece of new technology, he's the first to latch on to it and see how it works and then he reports back to the students and faculty so the new programs just don't sit in a closet somewhere."

Wennerberg has been instrumental with maintaining Riverside's computer system.

School District 2 has computer specialists who travel to the different schools, "but we don't need them much here," Wennerberg said, noting, "If a teacher has a problem with his computer, we can usually handle it within the building."

Wennerberg and his wife, Kristin, nearly didn't make it to the awards presentation for his international honor. En route to Columbus, Ohio, their plane was delayed in Minneapolis by a snowstorm.

"We actually missed the awards ceremony," Wennerberg said. "But then the next day at a luncheon, they called me and my wife up to the front and gave me the award there."

While Wennerberg is proud of the award, he said it should go to all the technology teachers in the district and in the state. They have their own association - the Technical Educators Association of Montana - and communicate freely among themselves.

"We share e-mail addresses and have a newsletter," Wennerberg said. "We give out statewide technology awards to students. I couldn't have survived the first couple of years without them."

The educators try to mentor new technology teachers and help them adjust to the demands of the job.

Wennerberg served two years in the Army and attended college on the GI Bill. He has served 16 years in the Army National Guard and is a staff sergeant.

"If anyone needs help in the school, you can always call on him," Smith said. "His ability to work with others is very evident.

"He's an all-around great guy."

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04-22-02

Spartanburg (SC) Herald Journal

Murder they studied: The case of the bloody bequest


By Teresa Killian

Eighth-graders discovered an abandoned Burger King bag last week near drops of red liquid - blood - in the mock murder investigation at Woodruff Middle School.

The mock investigation program under way for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders has been so successful, a key organizer, School Resource Officer Mitch Taylor, was asked to make a presentation about the program recently to other educators.

The idea is to let students see how science is used in an investigation - a hands-on lesson for students in Linda Robertson and Carolyn Huckeba's Investigations in Science classes. Meanwhile, students learn about the justice system and the logistics of an investigation.

Taylor spends about a month developing crime scenarios for students to explore in the classes.

One was hit-and-run in the teachers' parking lot. Another class explored a poisoning of a teacher after someone was required to stay extra hours grading tests. The third was an intentional death - for money.

Students investigating that scene photographed clues and combed the area for signs of a person who teachers role-playing in the fake case said was supposed to meet them for breakfast.

Days later, they found a supposed "body" near a wheelbarrow. They documented interviews about whereabouts and life insurance policies. They lifted fingerprints and compared them. The evidence is to be used in a court case planned for today.

Thirteen-year-old Robbie Wood said fingerprints were the hardest part. He and 14-year-old Kendall Dye pelted teachers with questions during a morning class last week.

Were you wearing a green shirt? Is the shirt missing a button that looks like the one found at the crime scene? Why did you have a wheelbarrow? Will you try on this glove found at the crime scene?

"It seemed like it fit pretty well," Kendall said.

Students worked on how to ask questions ­p; and follow-up questions.

"Ask them straight-to-the-heart questions, like 'Did you kill...?' " said Lt. Darrell Dawkins of the Woodruff Police Department, who helped administer the mock investigations program.

The cases progressed a little each day. One class was taunted by anonymous e-mails from "The Jester." Of a red hair he wrote, "You like Red. Not even a clue ... Just like to see you chase rabbits."

What's exciting is how into the scenarios the students get, Taylor said.

"The key is making it as real as possible," Taylor said. "It's not like a TV show.

"It's an exciting opportunity."

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04-25-02

Chicago Tribune

Pupils learning language of cable video production


By LeAnn Spencer
Tribune staff reporter

Smiling directly into the camera, Adriana Gomez, 11, introduced a television segment at the West Chicago Chamber of Commerce. Every now and then she giggled as she and the kids helping her flubbed their lines.

The shoot was part of a yearlong school project designed to help bilingual children gain real-world experience and use technology outside the classroom. In addition, the pupils practice their English skills and are exposed to people from different backgrounds.

The videos are shown on a community access cable channel. The project was funded in part by a $1,200 grant from the California-based Milken Family Foundation, which supports education.

During two filming sessions, one at the Chamber of Commerce and a second at a local dress shop, Adriana and three other 6th graders took turns at the mike, holding lights and prompting each other. In all, 30 pupils from Turner Elementary School in West Chicago have spent the last six months filming local organizations, agencies and businesses.

Adriana occasionally would pull a dog-eared, 3-by-5-inch card from the back pocket of her jeans and rehearse her handwritten script. Between takes, she proudly told a visitor, "The questions we made up after school."

After a successful finish, project leader Salvador Tamayo shouted, "Bravo!"

Tamayo, the 6th-grade teacher who also serves as cameraman and producer, said pupils do all the work. "And I just hold the camera."

The truth is that Tamayo, 42, is uniquely suited to coordinate the project because he has a degree in film and editing from Columbia College in addition to his teaching degree. The videos are slick and professional-looking.

Tamayo, who won a $25,000 Milken Family Foundation award for excellence in teaching in 2000, has long been interested in incorporating technology into his classroom.

Working with pupils, he has created a Web site for his school and organized a student club called Club Aztecas in which members participate in the film project and play soccer. Helped by Tamayo, the children have created a club Web site (www.clubaztecas.org) and posted video clips from their work and pictures of the soccer team.

Noting that middle schoolers are at an impressionable age and may be influenced by gangs, Tamayo said that much of his work is aimed at keeping pupils busy and involved in worthwhile, education-centered projects.

"One little push, and they can go the wrong way," he said. "If I can keep them busy and out of trouble, that's good."

The Milken grant is awarded through the foundation's Festival for Youth program to teachers planning community-service projects for youngsters in economically disadvantaged areas.

Turner School is part of West Chicago School District 33, where 55 percent of pupils are Hispanic, 31 percent have limited proficiency in English and about 29 percent come from low-income families.

"A lot of them don't have a place to go [after school]. They go home, and that's it and they don't have a chance to do anything else," Tamayo said. "When we have projects like this, they learn more than they would just being in a classroom and filling up worksheets."

For their informational videos, the pupils have visited Brookfield Zoo, interviewing scientists there and filming the dolphins.

Other work has included a film tour of the local library and Fire Department. The children have interviewed leaders of the local historical society and owners of local restaurants.

The pupils generally work in teams of four, each child taking turns at the microphone, holding lights and monitoring the takes. They help Tamayo with editing and writing subtitles.

Three more segments are planned before a closing ceremony near the end of May to which the entire community will be invited. The children are even working on a ceremonial dance to mark completion of the project.

Finishing in time is going to require a lot of hours after school and on the weekend, but the children say they aren't tired.

"It's very fun," said Janeth Anicua, 12, who said she likes it because "it's important."


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