Killing a Student

This blog is not about killing a student, but I knew the title would grab your attention. Hopefully you'll stick around long enough to read the rest. A good friend of mine commented today that he thinks my blog acts as therapy for me, and that he can't understand how I teach without killing someone. He was joking about the killing part of course...well I think he was anyway. Writing has always served as a form of therapy for me, and indeed part of my new blogging adventure does act as a rudimentary form of therapy. It also allows me to vent, share my opinions on current 'hot' topics in education, as well as share some stories ranging from the utterly ridiculous to the sadly sobering.

It was the latter part of his comment that really stood out in my mine, only because I've heard it so often from people over the years since I began teaching. When I decided to pursue my dream of teaching I instinctively knew that teaching in the middle school is where I would be most successful. When I would tell people I was going back to school to become a teacher, their eyes would light up with joy. The next question I was always asked is "what grade?". To this I would reply middle grades, and their lit up eyes would instantly grow dim as they looked at me as if I was an alien. It was a look that said "What the hell is wrong with you!?".

While anyone who teaches realizes fairly quickly that it is something you must truly love, perhaps even have a higher calling to do, or you would rapidly fall into mindboggling stress induced hysterics I believe that in order to teach at the middle school level effectively one's passion for teaching must be even greater than those that teach at the elementary or high school level. The reason is simple. On top of all the demands put on teachers today at any grade from K-12, middle school teachers have to teach the 'whole child'. The middle school student, typically beginning in late 6th grade to about the middle/end of 8th grade goes through a tremendous amount of changes physically, socially, emotionally, phychologically, cognitively...etc. So to hear people frequently suggest they would 'kill' a student if they had to teach at the middle school level is quite understandable, because as teachers of middle school students we are forced to be all things to all students while at the same time making sure they are educated. To borrow a famous motto from the U.S. Marines middle school teachers are the few, the proud, and the chosen.