Middle School is Like This

Overview:

A veteran teacher’s first year teaching at a New York City charter school leads to some tried and true lessons about middle school.

Everything is already over before, while, during, or after it’s already begun. Nothing in middle school lasts. Failure, success, shame, anxiety—all of it is over as quickly as it has happened. This is sometimes a curse. You may succeed during your two classes in the morning but still have abysmal failures in lessons, classroom management, or student interaction in the afternoon. You can’t say “I’ve had a good day” at 11 am. You’ve had a good morning. More accurately, you’ve had a good hour.

At the same time, this “everything is already over” phenomenon can also be a blessing. You may fail miserably and find yourself shouting ineffectively into the abyss of a room full of thirty students, no one listening. You may question not only your teaching credentials but your reason for being. But, because of the law of middle school, you and the students will wake up the next day and do it all again, and you and they will be renewed like freshly bloomed flowers.

It’s not always the case.

Certainly, you can fail at your lessons or classroom management for many days in a row, and you will need to change the atmosphere in the room, shift up rules and expectations, and make changes.

But mainly, you will find that the endlessly renewing energy of middle school works in your favor. And it works in their favor: the student who tries your patience, does not follow directions, talks back, calls out, shouts, or does worse, will, you will find, be the scholar you see the next day and greet with a happy smile.

It’s the energy of middle school, and it is a gift.

Gradually, as you get used to it, there will be, for you, in fact, a sense of the positive leveling off of a middle school day and year.

Everyone just wants to be seen.

I learned this slowly.

What is the most compelling piece of classroom management I have learned?

Narrate the positive, specifically naming scholars and what they are doing well. I’ve never seen a class of students kick into gear faster than when I say this. Even students who don’t think care about academics will suddenly start to actually do the actions of the lesson, if only to get their own name called out. I think even adults might respond well to this! I will admit that when the principal of my school mentioned my name at the school holiday party saying she saw me having fun with colleagues, the little middle schooler inside of me swelled with happiness. I knew I was a part of the community.

A powerful phrase: “I notice…”

By the same token, if you are having trouble connecting with students, simply saying something like, “I noticed you were yawning a lot today in class” can be a great conversation opening. It’s not a judgment but just a statement that lets the student know you have seen them. At a time of life when students often struggle with feeling part of a group or a community—and can find it hard to understand or process their own emotions—simply telling them something specific you see about them brings them into the present moment—and works wonders in forming your relationship with them.

Only connect:

To this day, I still remember my 8th grade algebra teacher, Mr. Kingston, saying, “Are you okay, Cindy? You look sad.” It wasn’t a big statement, but he let me know he saw me in the middle of math class. My feelings and my face mattered. I remember coming back to the moment, math class, and returning to the subject matter. But what I really felt was Mr. Kingston connecting with me. It’s all about connection.

A word about the word “relationships”

When I first took this middle school job, I kept hearing from my colleagues and administrators that everything depended on how well I formed and maintained relationships with my students. Something in me rebelled and railed against this. Relationships? With 6th graders? How was I to do this? These were children! How could I form a relationship with them? I think it’s the word “relationship.” I felt I could not rely on students to uphold their end of a relationship.

After a year of working with these middle school students, I realized that relationships just mean being nice to your students and cheerfully making them feel good and seen. There. What a concept. I can do that. Am I forming a relationship? That sounds arduous and impossible to do with 100 people at one time. But making scholars know I understand them, see them, and am thinking of them, and am curious about their lives (while also letting them know that I am not accepting all behaviors etc) is something I can do. Terminology matters, and this word, relationships, for me, did not resonate. This may happen to you. Find your own understanding of and words for these education-speak terms.

Don’t react.

You’d be amazed at what will go away if you don’t react to it. Certainly, the crinkling bottle sound of the young 6^th grader in the scholar will make you want to lose your mind as you are teaching your poetry lesson. During the first five months of teaching, I would be sure to say something repeatedly about stopping the sound. I would be sure to show agitation as I said it. The result? A cacophony of water bottles crinkling, not only from the scholar I admonished but also the other scholars in the room who now were amused and wanted only a reaction from me, which they received in spades.

Now? I know that that crinkling water bottle, while annoying and certainly done on purpose, will dissipate if I do not acknowledge it. Yes, it may go on for a minute or two. But by and large, it will stop. And if it continues, and I have ignored it the whole time, the other students in the room will begin to be annoyed, and they will act as the policemen in the room—telling the student to stop, saying that it’s annoying etc.

That was the best lesson I ever learned.

Low reaction. Low affect.

It’s for the Dogs!

There’s a little something to be learned from dog training here. I am no expert in dog training. But I know the basic concept is that a teacher is like the dog owner who must establish the role of the lead or alpha in the room. I learned this from a teacher at a previous school. She was a middle-aged woman about to start teaching a group of mainly 9th-grade boys known to be squirrely. True to this woman’s brilliant outlook on teaching, she decided to become an expert in dog training to prepare for working with these boys. She learned the principles. I am not saying students are dogs. What I am saying is that power and the ability to run a room adhere to the same dynamics of power and correction as dog training. All I know is to be the alpha.

Scholars who are new to the school provide their own challenges:

Scholars new to the school will gradually learn the culture. It will not be pretty. You will often get caught in the crossfire. Power through and you will see a change. Once they learn the culture of the school—and they may rail against it for a while—then they will begin to have a pathway for doing the work. You will see that often their work is simplistic or not deep. But they are beginning to do it. Allowing them to simply complete the work, even if it is not up to quality, is ok. They are creating the pathways in their brain for work completion. Then you can bring in the next step which is to ask them to deepen their work, add detail, examples, evidence. Over time, this is a recipe for success.

A few practical points:

I learned from a teacher in Minnesota I met at a conference, “There is no power struggle in the classroom; there is only the teacher and the students.”
An effective way to silence a room is to count down from 5 to 1 and narrate as you go. (And, remember, this, like all techniques, will not always work. It’s just one of some tools to use.) “5. you’re going to your seats, 4. you’re getting out your papers, 3. you’re beginning your voices to 0, 2. you’re tracking up to the front, 1. We are started. I learned that from a different Minnesota teacher at the same conference. The cushion of counting down from 5 to 1 allows time for students to hear you, gradually lower their voices, and then be ready to go.
Instead of going after a student and calling their name to tell them to be quiet or line up as expected, it can be helpful instead to merely tell all students that you will be observing them. You will not give them a personal invitation to do the thing expected of them. Tell them that if you see them do something that disrupts, you will be issuing a note to the parent (or give a detention) or whatever the consequence is. They won’t know whether you have done it, and this sense of not knowing will make them more prone to do the expected actions.

You’ve got to find your ally.

During your first year, this may be one person. It could be a teacher who starts as a new teacher with you–your few meetings during orientation allow for the connection that carries you through the rest of the year. Keeping up with this person may be hard to do, given how busy teachers are, especially in the first year, learning and catching up on all the tasks that need to be done. The times when you see this person may be few and far between. And also, those times matter. Grab them.

Critical mass

There is a critical mass of working somewhere. The first year, for me, is a morass of successes, swirling feelings, poignant moments with students, new connections with colleagues, miscommunication, people sussing me out, my sussing people out, mistakes, creative new assignments, misunderstanding, and then gradual acceptance. For me, there’s a point where I put in gels all the time, and suddenly people get me, accept me, or at least understand me. You have to remember this when you are in the middle of those first few months–when none of this has coalesced yet. Have faith and keep going.

Final thoughts:

All of this will work some of the time, and some of it will work none of the time. Most likely, none of it will work all of the time. This is to say that the best piece of advice I got about middle school teaching was from a friend who is not a teacher but a parent of a middle schooler. She said, really, most of the time, a middle school classroom is at a dull roar or, at the very least, contains constant streams of audible voices or sounds of papers rusting, pens tapping, feet tapping, and water bottles falling.

Wanting it or expecting it to be silent like a library is a setup for low self-esteem and crazy-making. Only one teacher can do that. It’s not you. He’s the teacher next door to you, who ushers students into his classroom silently, who knows how to silence the students with only a small hand gesture. Whose mere presence in the hallway brings about an audible shift of voices down to zero volume. That’s not you. That’s never going to be you. And it’s ok.

Cynthia Darling has been an educator for over twenty years. She is a Teacher Consultant with the National Writing Project and a Fellow with the Academy for Teachers. She is working on her MFA in Creative Writing from Bluegrass Writers Studio. Her writing appears at www.cynthiaburnsdarling.com.