Sometime between elementary and high school in the United States, all of us went to middle school. Or did we? Some of you are probably thinking that you went to junior high or that you moved from a lower to an upper school. Or, like my co-host, you found the years so trying that you’ve erased them from your memory. Today, we tackle the middle years in the American public school system, and we’re particularly interested in thinking about what it means to be in 9th grade. For many of us, our 9th-grade year was our freshman year in high school, but in some systems, 9th grade is the final year in middle school, so unlike many aspects of our system, there’s a lot of variability concerning how we should place our 14 and 15-year-olds. Today, we tackle the middle years, as we ask, “You’re in 9th grade, so you’re a freshman, right?!?!”