The 2019-2020 school year marked my tenth year of teaching. I taught at the college level for the first two years. The next two years were at both the college and high-school levels. The next four years were at the middle-school, high-school, and college levels, and the last two years were at the elementary-, middle-, and high-school levels.
All of which is to say that I approach middle schoolers in completely the wrong way — I expect them to be college students before I expect them to be themselves.
My understanding of middle schoolers doesn’t get much beyond the idea that all the middle-school brain cares about is the social dimension. Regardless of whether you ask them to parse a sentence or divide a fraction, all their brain will focus on is what they believe everyone else around them thinks about them.
The progressive response to this reality suggests taking middle-school kids out into the world and letting them explore: bring them to museums, theaters, natural wonders, local haunts, places of work, places of worship, places of celebration, places of mourning, carnivals, recycling factories, beaches, forges, bridges, trollies, ferries, abandoned warehouses, hospitals, sawmills, canning factories, coffee shops, activist headquarters, state houses, volunteer fire departments, parks, science labs, concerts, car garages, wood shops, architects’ offices, etc,
The key to the middle-school brain is exposure. If they focus on how they relate to their various peer groups (what this person thinks about that person, what those people think about them, etc.), let them focus on those things while being surrounded by a wide variety of opportunities. If their brain coincidentally blinks into focusing on something other than the social dimension for a moment, we want to make sure they have something interesting to focus on.
If that’s what their brain is going to do regardless of what adults might want it to do, the question becomes: how do adults help them do it in a healthy way?
First we have to recognize what it means for a middle-school brain to act healthy. In a lot of the education-focused literature I’ve read, the problem comes from the difference between the adult’s expectation of what a middle-school brain ought to be doing and what a middle school brain naturally does. Advice usually revolves around a foci of engagement and excitement, anything that will distract the students from being distracted by their peers.
Instead, I say let them be distracted. Social skills are way more important than math and reading, so adults ought to focus attention there. While we shouldn’t stymie any middle-school child from diving into a book or working on a numerical problem, we don’t want to push too hard in those areas either. We need to work to build an honest and trusting relationship so that the middle schooler is willing to take our healthy advice on how to approach their social challenges. If a teacher struggles to get a student to comply with a homework assignment, how much more will they struggle to get the student to share their hopes and fears?
So, after six years of working with middle school students, I guess that’s my advice: offer them opportunities to explore the wider world and earn their trust so they will believe you when you tell them the only thing they can do to solve their problem is have a difficult talk with the person they most don’t want to talk to.
Oh, and PS: get rid of their fucking cell-phone. You’re handing them a crack pipe, and while it can make a parent’s life so much easier in the short term, it’s doing untold damage to their brains that you (and they) will pay for later.
[This post was written by request. For a $5 donation to the Bail Project, you can assign me to write a 500-word [minimum] blog post on any topic of your choosing. For more details, read Writing for Bail Money.]
