I get asked quite a bit why in the world I choose to teach middle school or if it was because I am being punished for something. I really have to laugh at this. I honestly could not imagine teaching anything else but these wonderfully "hormonally challenged" teenagers. One of the main reasons I give to this inquiry is that I get to spend so much of my time dealing with teaching other things beyond just what my content is. On paper it says that I teach 8th grade science, but my day is filled with soooo many more lessons than just that. I teach accountability, conflict resolution, tollerance, compasion, time management, fairness, and how to be able to laugh at yourself.

Recently I found an incredible book that really captures the heart and mind of what it means to be a middle school student - "Fires in the Middle School Bathroom" by Kathleen Cushman & Laura Rogers [The New Press, 2008] - and it pegged exactly why I specifically like teaching this age group and it is probably the very reason why the majority of academia avoids it like the plague. They describe the constant mental dicotomy of a middle school student as :

• They want us to see them as more mature, but many of them still look like children.
• They want to be treated as more independent, serious young people, and they still want recess.
• They want to learn really intesting, "hard" things, but they want to learn them through games and activities.
• They want to be treated fairly - "just like everybody else" - and they also want us to make exceptions for them when they make mistakes.
• They want our recognition for what they do right, but they don't want anyone else to see us give it.
• They want to experiment with the rules - sneaking to the bathroom to snack or play with fire - but they do so wihtout guile, and so they get caught. 

[I would do a proper citation here but since I'm reading this book on my iPad, I cannot cite the exact page number]

This really is a perfect picture that they have painted in what every day looks like in my class. I absolutely love the fact that I do not know what any given student will be like from one day to the next because it will depend on what is happening at home, what their "BFF" did behind their back, what somebody said about them that morning on Facebook, just how late they stayed up without their parents knowing so they can play Halo, or even because of what they percieved was "a look" given to them in the hall way.

Oh yea, before they leave my class they will know all of Newton's Laws of Motion and how to read a Periodic Table of Elements but how that gets done from one period to the next is the true adventure.