Middle school teachers, chime in

In My Humble Opinion
1

I came across this article this morning. Now, I gather that this has been judged newsworthy in response to the whole Colin Adams controversy, but I want to know – are the conditions described typical of middle schools in lower-socioeconomic-status areas in the UK, or what? Or is this kind of disruption common to middle schools all over the developed nations today?

I am curious for a couple of reasons – one has to do with my work, which involves me quite closely with teachers and administrators in a school mental health setting. My personal observations have been that the middle school teachers have the most challenging behaviours to manage in their classrooms. Classroom walkouts, verbal challenges, and physical intimidation are things they cope with daily, but I always think that this is not surprising for classrooms where each child is struggling with some form of mental illness. Now, I am not quite so old that I don’t remember attending school in those years myself – and yes, I remember the kids as being > < this far from wild animals. However, my student memories do not recall the disruptions described in the article as anywhere near that level of frequency and intensity. I attended publicly funded school in the Roman Catholic separate system, with classroom sizes between twenty and thirty.

So, is the article a typical snapshot of what it’s like out there in middle school overall? Or is the general gist more like my own recollections, and the article is focusing on some outliers?

2

I suppose I’m an anomaly, since I teach in a private school in a fairly small city. We have small discipline problems, but nowhere near the scariness that is described in the article. I know in the public schools here there are some gang problems, but things seem to be more on the order of truancy and uncaring rather than violent attack on teachers.
Middle school seems to be the hardest years as puberty/hormones/OPPOSITE SEX!!! are really challenging the concentration of most kids. Year after year I reassure parents that their eighth-graders haven’t gone insane permanently, just give them some time and they’ll reappear normal about sophmore year.

3

I’m another middle school anomaly. When I started the year I had one class of eighth grade pre-algebra at a private school (it’s a part time job, can you tell?) which totaled a whopping three students, all of which happen to be girls. They’re very close friends, so occasionally they get chatty, but I have never once feared for my life. Since school started, I’ve also picked up upper-school health, which gives me two extra classes (alternating fifth and eighth one quarter and sixth and seventh the next) a week. I have the entire grade in my classroom, so it ranges from twenty-two fifth graders to fifteen eighth graders. Again, there are some chattiness issues, but nothing scarier than questions I don’t know the answers to come up in class.

I’m twenty-three and not too far removed from middle school. Ten years ago in rural, central Virginia there weren’t any major discipline problems, just, as schnuckiputzi has already noted, lots of hormones. I’m not in the UK though, so I’m probably not too useful to you other than as a bump for your thread.

4

I’m in the US and have taught in both high school and middle school. I find teaching middle school less challenging behavior-wise than high school verall. Your average 7th graders are still kids, and mostly still want their teachers to like them. They can be chatty, bratty, and mean to each other, but I find that, in the classroom, they are mostly engaged and aren’t violent. I have never witnessed an actual fight, though they do happen (in the gym and cafeteria mostly).

However, when you do have a student who is violent, it’s very hard to get them out of the general population. They make you jump through hoops of fire to get a kid “expelled,” or placed in a restrictive program. They are, of course, trying to protect kids from being shunted off, but on the rare occasions we have a student who I think is actually dangerous to other students or faculty, it can be VERY frustrating to get the kid the help he needs.

5

The kids in my Long Island, NY middle school are pretty well controlled; we have the usual attitude problems, but rarely is there a constant problem any larger than a class that is constantly running off at the mouth or kids failing to get to class on time. Don’t get me wrong - I think that kids are less well-behaved than when I was their age (roughly18 years ago), but I may be misremembering.

In any case, there have been more serious problems in my school, but they were one-offs. That is, they were not, I don’t think, symptomatic of a general swing toward criminality.

6

I teach high school, not middle school, but I have a couple general observations:

  1. So very much is going on in a school on a given day that it is very easy to cherry-pick out examples to prove anything at all: even if I have a severe discipline problem every single day, for example, most of my kids won’t see it (since they are divided into 6 classes). So assuming random distribution, my “every single day” is their “once a week or less”.

  2. I’d be highly dubious about data on discipline issues: it can wildly understate OR overstate actual frequency, depending on the school culture and the individual teachers. Some schools, you get hit with punative paperwork if you pass problems further up the ranks–you are supposed to deal with things yourself. Others, you are supposed to document document document and if you can’t produce records of every interaction, you’re in trouble. Also, some teachers tend to send problems out other their room, involving a write-up, where as others either tolerate a lot more in terms of behavior or have better classroom management skills to where the behaviors don’t occur so often or they simply deal with things in-house.

7

[nitpick]
Although it’s been a while since I’ve lived in the UK, I believe it’s still the case that middle schools, in general, don’t exist. The schools described in the article are secondary schools - years 7 to 12, ages 11 to 18, roughly.
[/nitpick]

Carry on.

8

Middle School teacher checking in.

It’s not true. 7th Grade is easy(as our 8th and 9th in my experience). The kids are still kids and react to authority with proper fear and respect. I love my kids and have not found that they are all that bad.

12th grade, however, was quite bad. It was depressing sometimes to see how worn out kids could get between 13 and 18 years old.

Anyway, my kids are always 13 in my mind and they are by no means horrors.

9

This sounds not unlike the Bulgarian school system. I was an elementary school teacher, but elementary school there goes to eighth grade, and since kids start school quite late, I had students as old as fourteen or fifteen. They were often quite rowdy, much worse than my own classes at that age. But it doesn’t compare to the high school aged kids.

At the end of seventh grade, Bulgarian kids take tests to see if they will be chosen for elite schools, which often require boarding in other cities. (My own village was too small to have any elite schools, but there was one for mathematics in the neighboring town that some of my students went to, and it was close enough that they could take the bus instead of boarding. But anyone who wanted to study any other subject had to board in the regional capital, which was a 45 minute bus ride away.) The kids who weren’t good enough/lacked the ambition stuck around at my school, and they were absolute hellions. I didn’t teach them, and I am glad of that. But the kids in our area who were REALLY bad got sent to the vocational school for working in hotels and restaurants, which was located in another wing of my school.

These kids were a lot like the ones in the story. I didn’t know them at all, because they didn’t even go to my school, but they all knew me (I was an exotic foreigner) and they would shriek my name and throw things at me when I walked past. They would come to my house and throw pebbles at my window. One HUGE kid, who must have been about 19 years old, once walked into my third grade classroom and refused to leave. He strode around my classroom, smacking my little kids until I grabbed the sleeve of his jacket and literally pulled him out. (He was at least twice my size.) It took a long time to pin down exactly who he was because my third graders told me his name was Ivan, which is the most common name in Bulgaria. Once, a group of these approached me and invited me to provide them with oral sex. I responded by whipping out my camera, taking a few pictures (since I didn’t know any of their names), and walking to their school’s teacher’s lounge, where I showed the pictures to the people there and told them about what had happened. I don’t know how much trouble they got in; the Bulgarian educational system doesn’t exactly have a lot of consequences for bad behavior.

I heard really bad stories from some of the volunteers who taught in high schools. (Most of them taught in the elite schools and had good students, but not all.) One volunteer had her students throw a lit firecracker at her. One girl’s students lit her blackboard on fire. (I didn’t know blackboards were flammable, but apparently they are.) There was a big scandal about a year ago when one student made a video on his cell phone of a classmate physically attacking his teacher while the rest of the kids made ape noises. (The video was played repeatedly on the news for a few days.) I wasn’t terribly surprised.

My colleagues always blame this stuff on democracy. Apparently life under communism was perfect and the children were all well-behaved and everyone went to the sea every summer. I don’t know about that exactly, but IMHO, the lack of respect and any kind of discipline in schools is a reflection of Bulgarian society, which did undergo total collapse less than twenty years ago and has now earned itself the distinction of being the most corrupt in Europe. Bribery is rampant, no one has faith in the government, rules are nonexistent. Why bother trying to get the schools in order when nothing else is?

10

In 6 years, I’ve only had one kid that I thought was really dangerous. He had 5 psychiatric illnesses diagnosed, including Oppositional Defiant Disorder. In the first 3 months of school, he skipped classes to wander the school, assaulted 4 other students, destroyed property, and disrupted almost every class he was in, yet it took daily logs of his many negative and disruptive behaviors over the course of a month (during which time another assault occurred) from 4 teachers, numerous disciplinary referrals, several in-class observations by the school social worker, the associate principal, and the school psychologist, and our team demanding a meeting with the district special ed chair before he got assigned a one-to-one aide. That is what I mean by frustrating obstacles. I am still worried that he will hurt somebody, but at least there is a grown man with him most of the time now, just in case.

But, one dangerous kid over the course of 6 years/600 students is an excellent track record IMO. Our middle school kids are pretty good.

11

I had a third grader like this last year. She was actually a pretty sweet kid, but she was totally unable to control herself. Unfortunately, her little brother was so off the wall that she looked sane in comparison and no one took me seriously about his sister’s behavior. Her mom had died and her father ignored the kids, leaving them to his own mother, who apparently was unable to properly tend to them. And of course there was no counseling or ability to diagnose anyone for anything.

I don’t really miss teaching all that much. Or maybe I just don’t miss teaching in a developing nation with no resources.

Okay, I won’t post in this thread again. (Maybe.)

12

Thanks to everyone who responded. I’m glad I don’t live in Bulgaria. It doesn’t seem to me that post-elementary school settings are quite as volatile as those described in the article, but I wanted to hear from some people in the know (and elsewhere).

From my own administrative point of view, this comment is very helpful:

It also fits in with my observations – while the teachers in mental health settings tend to be overall more skilled in dealing with behavioural and emotional extremes, there are certainly some who are just managing vs. others who are almost wizardly at it – some take great pride in rarely having to send kids out of the room, some have a knack for making kids quite literally fall in love with them and do the teacher’s bidding under a spell! Trust me, I have skills of my own – but it can be very inspiring to observe.

13

There is an entire new school of thought on middle schools (according to the textbook I use when teaching Developmental Psychology).

Currently many school systems use 6/2/4 (6 years of grade school, 2 years of middle school and 4 years of high school).
Some have tried 6/3/3.
However, most educators now believe the best way to go is 8/4 - totally skipping middle school and going from grade school to high school.

The theory is that kids in middle school age are not prepared for the extra stress of going from controlled, one-teacher, one-classroom environments to multiple teacher, multiple classroom environments. I believe it has become the official policy of the National Educators Association to end the concept of middle school completely.

Anecdotically, I know of many teachers who would rather go defuse land mines than teach in a middle school. Those I know who have taught there say it is a combination of hormones, horrible family life or parents who don’t care and a basic lack of control that makes teaching there intolerable.

14

Mostly correct, and certainly so for the examples used in that article. Three-tier schooling does still exist in a few areas though.

To me, that Telegraph article has a very deliberate political slant, which may not translate so easily outside of the UK. Vague attacks over ‘schools in chaos’ is an easy button to push for the rumour mills of the middle classes, when most people don’t actually ever see schools in action.

I’m not going to rush to defend some of the schools listed, it certainly is possible or perhaps likely that some are badly-run places, not providing even an adequate environment for staff or pupils. However, some of the reporting is disingenuous: listing raw facts such as ‘39 cases of rudeness’ fails to remind the reader that this is in the context of a community of perhaps 1000 or 1500 people. What’s more, the mention of the Oasis Academy riot at the bottom shows how much they’re prepared to overlook the full story when it’s convenient to do so.

No, I don’t recognise what’s described, not in the slightest. I’ve worked in a large number of different state schools, from the most middle-class and the highest achieving (not always the same thing) to some dealing with all the difficulties associated with very deprived areas. Some certainly deal with behaviour problems better than others, and one part of this is keeping a reliable and methodical record of issues as they arise, an action which has now been used by the Telegraph as a way to pillory individual schools.

15

Is this really a “new school of thought”? I recall it as an old idea–my own elementary school (Toronto, mid-1960s) was K to 8 until they build the new middle school next door for grades 7 and 8. A middle school (or, as Toronto called it, a “senior public”) to keep the early teens with raging hormones away from the little kids, as well as to introduce them to the idea of multiple teacher/classroom environments, was the new idea then–perhaps everythng old is new again?