It was 1988. My first year as a high school English teacher in a girls’ school had just ended. I was heading to Alabama for my wedding when the head of the school called me to his office to announce a temporary reassignment for the following fall. “Ms. Renkl, I’m suddenly in need of a seventh-grade Latin teacher, and you minored in Latin,” he smiled, unaware that graduate school had burned all Latin declensions and conjugations out of me. “You’ll love middle school.”
Surely I am the only bride who ever packed a first-year Latin textbook on a nine-week camping honeymoon, but he was right about one thing: I was entranced with my new students, who were going through an explosive metamorphosis. They started the year as little girls. By May, they had all become young women.
That year Aperture published “At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women,” by the Virginia-based photographer Sally Mann. (Out of print for years, the book was recently reissued, from new scans of Ms. Mann’s prints.) I kept “At Twelve” checked out of the school library for most of the year, poring over the images as if they held some clue to the changes I was watching unfold every day in my classroom.
