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The Wonders and Challenges of Middle Level Teaching - Continued...

           Another, and probably the most frustrating, stage of development that middle school students experience is puberty. This becomes very challenging for a teacher to handle because, quite often, any word that has even a remote possibility of being used in a slightly sexual context will cause an uproar of laughter throughout the classroom. According to veteran middle school teacher Marjorie Shepherd, “You might be a middle school teacher…if you have successfully eliminated from your vocabulary all words and phrases which could be construed as having anything to do with pubescent body parts or things those parts could do with each other, such as nut, ball, melon, jug, crack, hard, soft, limp, rubber, bone, French, stick, stroke, whack, poke, feel, lick, insert, suck, or blow” (Wormeli Pg. 8). This joke has real meaning, however, as middle school students often giggle at all of these words, no matter what the context may be. It is a tricky game of assembling a vocabulary that will cause the least interruption, but at the same time is also a chance to teach students maturity and that words such as these should not be assumed in a sexual context. Though middle level students have a track record for being immature in many ways, one must be careful not to assume that they are incapable of thinking in very mature ways, as was mentioned earlier.

            The final wonder of middle school students is their new found ability to make choices. Do not let all this talk of rowdiness and immature sexual humor fool you, for the students’ newly developing prefrontal cortex allows for teachers to, for the first time in the students’ educations, place decision making into their hands. As students grow mentally, they need to be given the chance to exercise the new parts of their brains that are forming. Allowing students to determine how an activity can be completed is a very easy way to enable student decision making. This is where I believe my own personal theory of manipulative democracy works very well. One can allow the class to make choices pertaining to their education, but the choices can be set up in a way that all of them accomplish a desired goal set by the teacher. This way, the students feel the responsibility of decision making while the teacher can be sure that they are learning what they need to learn. One should never underestimate what middle level students are capable of and simple decision making is the first chance for them to spread their wings.

            Many people have a negative view of middle school, often because many of people’s memorable bad experiences happened during this period in their lives. I had a very positive middle school experience; one that I believe shapes my view on middle level teaching to this very day. Middle school was when I first decided what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a teacher, just like my favorite teacher Mr. B. Though I decided not to be a history teacher, the desire to teach never left me. One thing that I always loved about Mr. B’s history and language classes was discussion. During language class, we would all sit around a big table and discuss the reading we had done the night before. We would ask questions, receive answers from our peers, and tell how the reading made us feel. In World History, I remember a very specific project in which we were allowed to choose any country in the world and do a two month research project. The project itself had very structured deadlines, but Mr. B did not discourage me at all when I chose to research Afghanistan or when I chose Osama bin Laden as my famous person. He is, by far, one of the best middle level teachers I have ever known.

Many of my classes in middle school were loosely structured. In science class, once a project was introduced, students were allowed to work with minimal teacher involvement. One of these projects was the science fair, in which the teacher would step back and let students perform their own experiments and set up their own presentations. The teachers were only there if a student needed them; they let the students learn on their own. One of the various science teachers I had required that every Thursday be “Current Events Day,” during which we would all research anything that was new in the world of science and share it with the class. This was a wonderful example of students teaching students and it worked very well.

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