How can we make middle school matter more?
A conversation with a middle school teacher helps me to rethink middle school -- and to imagine how reimagining high school might help.
The first class that I taught was a middle school class. It was the summer between my junior and senior years of college, and around the classroom’s enormous Harkness table, these seventh graders looked comically miniature. It was an accelerated specialized summer program; I was to teach them about great books and reading. Five weeks into the six week program, I’d made a few important decisions: the first, that I loved to teach; the second, that five weeks was the longest frame of time I’d ever want to spend with a group of middle schoolers; third, that furniture in schools should fit the humans who use it. The last realization is, here, the most important.
Furniture isn’t really the topic of this newsletter, though many of my colleagues have heard my righteous frustration when I’m teaching high school seniors in desks that are too small for any human who stands more than five and a half feet tall. When I think about those tiny heads and shoulders that truly barely poked over the edge of the big oak table, I think about the structures we put students -- often and specifically middle school students -- into that really don’t serve them very well.
This week’s conversation on In REAL Time, with Callie Hammond, pointed me back to this problem. Though I do technically teach middle school as part of my current job -- our school includes eighth grade in the high school, and I teach one section of eighth grade -- Callie is an expert middle school teacher. She’s a dean of eighth grade, a seventh-grade teacher, and a sixth-grade veteran. She’s tapped into the middle school mindset, so much so that she could easily articulate that around that age she “loved English and reading” but “always struggled in English class because [she] didn’t like people telling [her] what to read and write.” That’s a middle school thought if I’ve ever heard one. Some people are, at their core, tapped into middle school mindsets; Callie is one of those people, and I am not.
When I asked Callie about her hopes for the future of education, she told me:
“I would love for the future of schools to be one in which students are truly engaged - not just in their seats - and where they really feel like they are preparing for their future. I want our students to learn academic skills and life skills. I spend a lot of time thinking about middle school, especially, and my wish for the future of middle school would be that kids feel like middle school has a point. The girls at my school will even say “oh, no one cares about us, they only care about the lower schoolers or the high schoolers.” My middle schoolers are ready for more - more leadership, more say, more experiences - but we often don’t let them do more. There’s so much that educators can do to enhance education in middle school.”
My own middle school experience never brought me this feeling of being sandwiched, but that’s because my (excellent) middle school was the terminus of a school that began in Pre-K: as seventh- or eighth-grade students, we were the unequivocal leaders of the school. That implicit leadership made a big difference, especially because we were in a girls’ school. There was a special alchemy to a place that created many large, meaningful conclusions at the end of middle school, I’ve realized now, because it meant that those last few years in the school felt significant, full of achievement and mastery experiences and rituals recognized by the community. I cared much more profoundly about my eighth grade graduation than I did about my high school, college, or graduate school graduations.
Increasingly, I recognize that this middle school experience is extremely weird.
I was interested that Callie pointed, first, to the hope that students felt as if they were preparing for their futures, because that’s a key part of research on motivation and engagement in high school years, but it’s not the first place I look to when I think about middle school. What’s the future to a middle schooler? Well, “the future” is, we say and they assume, high school. Most parents laser-focus on making sure that their middle-schoolers are on track with skill and content knowledge to prepare them for high school. A middle schooler has to practice writing an essay, be able to read and understand a book, divide fractions, understand exponents and negative numbers in order to survive in high school. Students, still very definitely under the influence of their parents at this point, respond to that perspective and also see high school as an end game; their fixation is fueled by the high-school movie genre, staple of American film. Ironically, teachers in elementary and middle school often ask students to name “what they want to be when they grow up,” put up posters with slogans like “Dream Big!” or “Reach for the Stars!” -- but students believe that that “grown up” is a distant, vague future. What’s to say, though, that recognizing the transfer of middle school skills and disciplines to the “real world” won’t be just as empowering for middle schoolers?
Though educators know that middle school has a “point,” as Callie points out, most students don’t, and they’ve received that idea from somewhere. Kids don’t just learn more complex social skills, but they also learn skills, coping mechanisms, and executive functioning strategies that are directly relevant to real-life work. When Callie named that many middle schoolers “are ready for more… but we often don’t let them do more,” the thought really resonated with me. If there were one phrase that defined middle school, in my mind, it’s the phrase “hold off for now.” Certainly, many kids want to grow up too fast or take on tasks and ideas that they aren’t ready for yet. The furniture that adults would sit in is too big. But often, the problem seems to be the opposite: the “furniture” -- the structures and systems of school -- is more often too small. If the only message that middle school students hear is that they’re going to have to wait (stick with the small stuff, the basics), why and how do we expect students to sustain and develop ambition, creativity, and drive (the big kid seats) once they arrive to high school? Realistically, you’d need quite a mix of furniture if you were going to fit every kid right, and once you had the right mix, they’d all just be ready for a different size. What we have to find is a system that fosters growth that can feel satisfying, recognizable, and empowering, even and especially at an age when the world limits students’ authority over themselves.
A couple of years ago, the legendary show PEN15 (by comedians Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle) appeared on the scene and immediately encapsulated an extraordinary slice of the millenial experience back in the “good old days” of middle school. Maya and Anna (the creators play the main characters, and in those roles use their real-life names) experience constant frustrations, partly rooted in their desire for agency over their own life experiences. Arguably, girls and women experience this limited agency more powerfully and more emotionally, in part because they are (physically) more mature than the boys around them, but they’re treated as developmentally parallel. That disproportionate feeling of powerlessness is formative. Maybe even especially because of this proportional skew -- is power granted to kids following a pattern of readiness determined by male maturation? -- making middle school matter to girls is especially vital.
When I began teaching at my current school, I was thrown into eighth grade, and I had very little experience (beyond that summer job) working with students younger than ninth grade. What I found was that, if I treated my middle school girls as if they were capable of the same level of student discussions and the same level of writing as my previous ninth graders -- perhaps with a little more support at first -- then they easily and readily rose to the occasion. Once they got used to the scary feeling of Big Changes and Real Demands, they found the learning refreshing and motivating. Getting eighth graders thinking on a ninth grade level was possible, I think, in part because of the absence of boys, who (on average, but not hegemonically) operate cognitively and socially on a different time scale. But I also believe that any eighth grade classroom, with students of any gender and gender proportion, could probably do the kind of work that first group of eighth graders showed me I could do with them.
I’m starting to think that middle schoolers deserve this dose of rigor, expectation, and achievement, and that schools do well to let their teachers to create ambitious mastery experiences in which middle school students can see their successes as monumental and tangible, not just vague jumping off points for a future when the Real Stuff Happens. For successes to feel important in this way, students need to feel like they’ve taken on (or even been invited into) bigger, unfamiliar, and even uncomfortable spaces. Certainly, not every middle school kid is ready to sit in teenage furniture, but some of them are. Creating mastery experiences doesn’t necessarily mean forcing (or expecting) middle school students to work beyond their grade levels; instead, it’s about a community coming together to create atmospheres in which student work in these years marks a significant step forward into a future that’s bigger than just the next few years of school.
Like I said, I’m no expert here. There are skills sets that middle school teachers possess that I can’t even begin to master; working with late middle school kids who missed the developmental work of the classroom in a pandemic has only persuaded me more powerfully that middle school teachers possess several forms of strength and skill that I don’t. I’m the first to admit that the way that high school teachers often talk about middle school is through a deficit frame: we’re constantly griping about all of the things that students didn’t learn and master then. But would this really happen if high school didn’t hold so tightly to its persona as “the place where kids become adults”?
As a high school teacher, if I abandon the idea that sophisticated skills are my purview alone, I can make space for colleagues, peers, parents, and students to see that middle school kids are capable of sophisticated and meaningful accomplishments. If I can decenter my own and my older students’ sense of importance, I can help give educational airtime to the value of younger kids’ experience (not to mention the incalculable value of the work my colleagues do with younger students). If parents can follow my lead, they might find that the pressure and anxiety of high school softens a little bit, which is a culture shift that we’re all waiting for.
When I was in middle school, I was a voracious reader. My mother wanted to make sure that I constantly had books to read -- books that challenged me and interested me. She was also nervous about what opening up all the books in the world might open up to me, because she had a sense of what I was ready for. There were limitations, and I still went around those limitations, borrowing the entire Gossip Girl series from a friend while I was at summer camp (sorry, Mom) -- I sat in furniture that was, in its content, a little bit too big for me. I also didn’t accept all of the challenges that my mom gave to me; I didn’t give David Copperfield a chance. Sometimes we aligned and sometimes we didn’t align, but what mattered was that Mom never said “hold on” or “hold off,” but instead said, “let me find a way to connect you to the good stuff.”
What Callie seems to be saying, to me, is that there are ways to give the good stuff of life to middle schoolers. “One size fits all” never works well with thirteen year olds, and it’s time to help them see all the ways that that’s an opportunity, not a limitation.