The French Kids Aren't So Bad

French class this year has been a weird experience for me. Being a junior amongst a class of tiny ninth graders really makes me examine how much I've changed since my first days in high school. I have changed so much, the awkward chubby kid that used to wear sneakers and hoodies is from a distant past, and that boy doesn't even look like me. I look at every kid in this class and think "they're gonna look back at these moments and feel so embarrassed". Most will hide the pictures of themselves from this stage in their lives. They'll question the music they listened to and most of all feel ashamed of how they act in class.
Let me get something straight, this ninth grade class, the class of 2017, is the kindest in the school right now. I walk into French class and I watch the innocence that these ninth graders still have. Normally this innocence is lost somewhere in the sixth or seventh grade, when kids start cursing and masturbating, but these kids, they seem so pure. Not to say that 2017 doesn't curse or masturbate, but there is something fantastic about the dynamic of the class.
There are no divisions in the class. This surprised me so much. Normally you can immediately tell cliques, they're pretty easy to spot and something that has been part of every school since the beginning of time, but this class confuses me. The kids that are supposed to mean, aren't, and the ones who are supposed to be quiet, aren't. It's amazing to see a chubby kid with glasses treated no differently than the more mature kid who already started shaving. It's something fantastic. This class is childish, they scream out in class and show the same respect for learning as kindergartners, but is that such a bad thing? I certainly remember that my grade wasn't like this. There were certain kids in my classes that I tried to avoid, and my grade even came up with a name for our popular clique, the rat pack. The 2017ers don't have a rat pack, or maybe they do and I hope that one of the freshmen in STAC would correct me, but even if there is a rat pack or a cockroach herd or whatever you would want to call it, it could never stand up to what existed in my grade, at least not from what I've seen.
These kids are good people, my French class is loud and annoying when they wont listen to instruction, but going to that class is such a relief. My day is full of having to deal with kids that have seen the worst of what high school has to offer, and the kids in my French class are just that, kids, undamaged and hardly scratched by torments of middle school. To say I have hope for the future is wrong, someday each and every child in that class will learn how awful people can be and the cliques and gossip will eventually turn them into what we all are now, but I did learn something about innocence.
Innocence is something beautiful and rare. A boy is special not because of his youth, a little girl's cuteness doesn't come from her floral dress. What makes kids special is their innocence. We protect the young from the truth of the world because to us, the corrupt and broken, this innocence is something that we can never have again, only observe in those who haven't seen yet.