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Yaki struggles to feel at home in her new country and her new school, but her creativity and Mayan culture help to ease the transition.

Few of us really want to remember what we looked like in middle school, but nobody wants to remember what it felt like to be the kid who had nothing to sign on the last day of class.

A Cincinnati school serves Mix It Up as part of academic life.

The first day of my second year of teaching, a third-grader walked into class, saw another student and punched him in the nose. He didn’t say anything or give any indication that he was going to do this. It just happened. After cleaning up the blood and redirecting the class, I asked the attacker why he wanted to punch someone else. “He’s Mexican,” he said. “He don’t belong in my class.”

Last month, 12-year-old Alexa Gonzalez used an erasable marker to scribble on her desk. “I love my friends Abby and Faith,” she wrote, along with, “Lex was here. 2/1/10,” punctuated with a happy face. But neither her Spanish teacher nor the principal at Alexa’s Queens, New York, middle school were amused. They called school security—New York City police officers—who arrested and handcuffed Alexa, and walked her across the street to their precinct, according to the New York Daily News.

Denver students confront racial tracking at their high school.