I teach middle school.
That is usually enough to elicit some kind of reaction from people. Usually they pat me on my head and whisper "bless your heart". Sometimes they tell me how sorry they are and offer me chocolate. Some call me a saint. Some tell me to get a real job. I always appreciate the sympathy and advice.
It takes a while to begin to learn to understand middle school students. Most of the time they gradually change. For example, a middle schooler who is angry and defiant at 8:00 (aggressive) might be sleeping by 8:01 (passive). It has happened more than once.
The truth is they are passive aggressive. Passive aggressiveness is defined as a type of behavior or personality characterized by indirect resistance to the demands of others and an avoidance of direct confrontation, as in procrastinating, pouting, or misplacing important materials. To be honest there are passive aggressive middle school students, but I don't think that the population of them is much higher than it is in the general public.
Middle schoolers are passive when they are in the mood when they don't care. They are aggressive when they are in the mood that they really don't care. They get to the point where they defiantly don't care. They rebound to the point where they don't care but are too disinterested to pretend they care.
There are exceptions to the rule. Some middle school students do genuinely care about their education. We do our best to remove those students from the regular classroom by sending them to gifted classrooms...or in school suspension if they are too bored.
This all leads me to my point for the day...a question that has been boiling in my mind for the past few years. Do students appreciate the opportunity that is afforded them in American education? Have students, parents, and America in general become passive toward the great investment that is given to public education?
I recently watched a video showing a classroom in Africa. They were in a one-room schoolhouse and were intensely engaged in their teacher's lesson. There were no refocus commands. There were no paras sitting by special education students...taking notes while the student stared at their phone. In short, the students respected the teacher, the value of the education, and were definitely engaged.
Where did we go wrong in America? I have to tell you that I don't know the answer. I know the question...and teachers...and many adults everywhere are dealing with the aftermath.
I hate to say it, but we can't blame the kids for doing what society has enabled them to do. You can't remove boundaries, lighten consequences, and then expect people to blindly find their way to a moral high ground.
Of course, this is not a new thing. Consider this quote:
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
No, that wasn't from some random middle school teacher. It was actually written 2200 years ago by Socrates!
Just some random thoughts. Sorry if it wasn't funny. It is actually sad and scary, and it will affect us all.
That is usually enough to elicit some kind of reaction from people. Usually they pat me on my head and whisper "bless your heart". Sometimes they tell me how sorry they are and offer me chocolate. Some call me a saint. Some tell me to get a real job. I always appreciate the sympathy and advice.
It takes a while to begin to learn to understand middle school students. Most of the time they gradually change. For example, a middle schooler who is angry and defiant at 8:00 (aggressive) might be sleeping by 8:01 (passive). It has happened more than once.
The truth is they are passive aggressive. Passive aggressiveness is defined as a type of behavior or personality characterized by indirect resistance to the demands of others and an avoidance of direct confrontation, as in procrastinating, pouting, or misplacing important materials. To be honest there are passive aggressive middle school students, but I don't think that the population of them is much higher than it is in the general public.
Middle schoolers are passive when they are in the mood when they don't care. They are aggressive when they are in the mood that they really don't care. They get to the point where they defiantly don't care. They rebound to the point where they don't care but are too disinterested to pretend they care.
There are exceptions to the rule. Some middle school students do genuinely care about their education. We do our best to remove those students from the regular classroom by sending them to gifted classrooms...or in school suspension if they are too bored.
This all leads me to my point for the day...a question that has been boiling in my mind for the past few years. Do students appreciate the opportunity that is afforded them in American education? Have students, parents, and America in general become passive toward the great investment that is given to public education?
I recently watched a video showing a classroom in Africa. They were in a one-room schoolhouse and were intensely engaged in their teacher's lesson. There were no refocus commands. There were no paras sitting by special education students...taking notes while the student stared at their phone. In short, the students respected the teacher, the value of the education, and were definitely engaged.
Where did we go wrong in America? I have to tell you that I don't know the answer. I know the question...and teachers...and many adults everywhere are dealing with the aftermath.
Of course, this is not a new thing. Consider this quote:
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
No, that wasn't from some random middle school teacher. It was actually written 2200 years ago by Socrates!
Just some random thoughts. Sorry if it wasn't funny. It is actually sad and scary, and it will affect us all.
I think Coach Martin's statement is correct. I had never read it before this morning, but I think, in a nutshell, its summation is very true.
ReplyDeleteI thought that this deterioration started within my lifetime, say following the 1960s when my generation was 'enlightened' and we sought change to the world order. So, beginning with our own kids, we innocently altered our children's philosophical relationships to their families, teachers, and the world at large. New Age children learned their rights as human beings, shrugged off our expectations, the courts let them, and adults have adopted passive aggressive behaviors to cope.
It's probably true enough, but then I encountered this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights-children/ in my search trying to pin down when things really went askew. It gave me pause to question not only my perspective, but Coach Martin's as well.
I recall my middle school experience in Des Moines, 1963-1966, was a real eye opener for me; there was a lot of violence in the classroom. The school had an enforcer-like teacher, "Mr. Swan," in my case, who would be called from his classroom to handle whatever behavioral issues came up. The unruly were aggressively hauled out of the room by their shirt collars, shoulders or arms, followed by the sounds of their body hitting the hallway lockers, sometimes repeatedly.
There were repercussions for negative behavior in the classroom, everybody knew that. Sadly there are no enforceable repercussions today.
Here's my take on the middleschool years - and yes, it's developmental. At this age, we find ourselves developing a proto-intellect grounded in rules - and yes - in roles, where thought is experienced largely as a process of conformity to peer pressures and adults enforcing routines. Middleschoolers are learning how to reason based on the proscriptive tenants of a simple-minded curriculum, where only the most talented teachers know how to lead the students' thoughts to explore beauty, rather than to memorize, encode, and encrypt facts, otherwise known as truth.
ReplyDeleteAll the while, ugliness slowly and painfully erupts on the surfaces of those once smooth, creamy-skinned, flawless boy/girl bodies. Hairs spurt; skin folds produce stinky sweat; sweet voices ululate as if possessed by another being; mounds grow (never as fast or as much as one wishes); facial shapes change disproportionally to assume the features of dwarves, trolls, elves; wardrobes must be changed more frequently to accommodate the rapidly growing body, where sartorial choices become the most difficult decisions in the middleschooler's mindworld. In short, this is the developmental period when a person experiences the nadir of their lifetime self-esteem.
And most sad of all, the adultworlders have consistently degraded the former havens of fantasy and imagination. Imagine Calvin and Hobbes written with Calvin as a middleschooler - it just doesn't work. Homo sapiens has one of the longest periods of child dependency in the biosphere, where the human brain is not fully developed until age 26 years. Fantasy and imagination are the lifeblood of youth. You talked about the question boiling your brain, but you actually asked three questions. My responses are these:
Middleschoolers are too young to appreciate what education has to offer.
Students, parents, and America have come to see public education like a gas station: pull up to the pump on a regular basis, pay your dues, and you'll get educated. It's simple as that. If it's not working, the teachers aren't doing their jobs.
America went wrong by managing education as a tool of the marketplace rather than as a cultural institution, where the outcome should be informed adults who know how to learn more about what interests them, and where the student's family, teachers, community, state, and nation have modeled discernment and wisdom.
A side note...I noticed that many students who are...trying...at the middle school age grow out of it. They even are polite and appreciative of teachers who they put through the ringer in middle school.
ReplyDeleteSocrates said it all. The world is always going to hell in a handbasket.
ReplyDeleteCoach Martin is mad as hell, but he has no solution.
That's because there is no final solution.
We have big problems, but what worked forty or a hundred years ago won't do now.
We'll continue to muddle through with fewer or greater numbers of people getting hurt.
And John, you do good work. Seriously.