This article makes it really clear why I work on the high school level, and why I'd prefer to go back to working with elementary school kids if high school were ever to stop being an option. Teaching middle school is just too much!

Faced with increasingly well-documented slumps in learning at a critical age, educators in New York and across the nation are struggling to rethink middle school, particularly in cities, where the challenges of adolescent volatility, spiking violence and lagging academic performance are more acute.

As they do so, they are running up against a key problem: a teaching corps marked by high turnover, and often lacking expertise in both subject matter and the topography of the adolescent mind.

The demands of teaching middle school show up in teacher retention rates. In New York City, the nationÂ’s largest school system, middle school teachers account for 22 percent of the 41,291 teachers who have left the school system since 1999 even though they make up only 17 percent of the overall teaching force, according to the United Federation of Teachers.

Frankly, I prefer working with the older kids because they tend to think and act in a more mature, adult fashion. I also prefer high school because I know all my colleagues will be trained in our subject matter, something you can't count on at the middle school level. Many teachers on th middle school level are just displaced elementary teachers -- generalists who took a content specific job when it became available. After all, my certificate runs grades 6-12 and is content are specific, but an elementary certificate runs from kindergarten to grade 8 or 9 in most states and carries with it no subject area limitations. That means a middle school history teacher might have no more than the minimum number of social science classes required to graduate from college -- generally meaning two. Thhey therefore often do a poor job of teaching the content because they don't know it.

Posted by: Greg at 01:12 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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