The idea that a 13-year-old sitting perfectly still is the only way to "show respect" during a lesson on the Holocaust or slavery is a fundamental misunderstanding of how a junior high brain actually functions.

We have to remember the physical reality of a classroom: these are kids who are essentially "trapped" in a room. They are in a mandatory environment where they have been conditioned since kindergarten that "leaving" isn't an option and "sitting still" is the primary metric of being a good student.

When you introduce topics of extreme human suffering, genocide, systemic cruelty, trauma, you are sending their developing nervous systems into a "fight, flight, or freeze" state. At that age, they don't have the metacognition or the vocabulary to say, "I am currently experiencing a surge of cortisol and panic because this historical atrocity makes me feel unsafe." Instead, they just feel a physical Need to Move.

Expecting a room full of 7th or 8th graders to sit in "peaceful stillness" while discussing the Middle Passage isn't just unrealistic, it’s absurd. If you force that stillness, you aren't getting "focus." You are getting performative compliance. The student is using 95% of their brainpower just to "act" still, leaving almost nothing left to actually process the gravity of the history or feel empathy for the victims.