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The Middle School phenomenon
has caused, in my opinion, more damage to the education system than any other “progressive”
reform. It had emerged several decades ago, here, and later in other countries,
from a previous system dividing the elementary / high school system into three
stages, adding a Junior High School. The Junior High concept was created to
escalate students’ academic preparedness for the higher grades by breaking away
from the traditional elementary school, and provide thus more rigorous studies,
as a better readiness for higher education.
It was in the early seventies
when academia people started to wonder if it is right to enforce strict
academic measures on early teens, and therefore limit their time and ability
for creativity and socializing. Combined with new psychological theories a new
trend surfaced that resulted in easing academic demands on young adolescents,
trying to create a warmer transition from elementary to high school.
Some countries around the
world, and few districts here in the States, however, stayed with the
Junior-Senior concept, and even smaller number of organizations kept the eight –four,
elementary high-school, system long after it was pronounced “old fashion”.
Those few “survivors” can smile now and say “See - we told you…”
Luckily, I grew up in a
country that, at the time, kept the 1-8 elementary and 9-12 high school system.
Back then my young country was one of the world’s leaders on the education rank
list, and it produced a genius generation of engineers and inventors in every
field. Its place on the list dropped miserably after adapting some “progressive
methods”, one of them is the middle school system… It is not my place to debate
what caused the education level drop, and what part of it is due to adapting
the middle school system. All I can do is describe my own experience…
I can testify to having the
best time of my schooling life during those last three years of my elementary
school, especially those critical 7th and 8th grades. We all grew up together,
started to mature together, and made room for the emerging stars among us. We didn't have to re-invent a social structure and fight our place in it. We were
comfortable in our world of being the seniors in our little kingdom, and thus our
minds were free to absorb and progress. Now, years later, I realize that my
best childhood and adolescence friends are those who were part of my world
during those precious years of 12 to 14…
Raising my kids here, and
sending them to the local, well acclaimed, schools, I watched with dismay their
experience going through the middle school horrid system. My daughter, an ‘A’
student, shy and delicate, spent most of her lunch breaks by herself, and was trying
to get involved in any school activity that could save her from a social isolation.
My son, who could have been an ‘A’ students had he not been caught in the
middle-school madness, was desperately trying to prove the cool guy in the new,
chaotic, social structure in order to socially survive…
Being the foreign, new comer,
that I was, I did not grasp the harm in the middle-school insanity until years
later, too late, by then, to mend the scars that were left.
Yet, still not fully
comprehending the whole picture, I decided to become a middle school math teacher,
believing that my skills will be best used teaching arithmetic and those
ill-understood concepts of fractions, decimals and percentages… It was only
when I actually started teaching that I realized how impossible it is to teach
anything in middle school, let alone mathematics...
What’s amiss in middle
schools?
It is absolutely the wrong
structure, at the wrong age…
The first time I was faced
with a system that required me to choose classes and move from one classroom to
another I was at my freshman year of the university. We were all so confused
that we thought we will never be able to graduate… and most of us were over
twenty by then… Of course it is not quite the same, yet I can’t imagine facing
a similar system at the age of eleven, after being under the clear, strict care
of the elementary school organization for five or six years…
Pre and young teens are at an
age when they need structure and direction more than ever. Unfortunately, right
at that fragile age we open the gates for them and let them free to go to an uncharted territory. All of a sudden the cushioning and protection given to
them at elementary school is let go, and the rules abruptly change on them;
Moving from one classroom to another, with anonymous new teacher in every class,
and hundreds of new faces almost every period of the day.
The social structure that was
carefully balanced for that many years is undone exactly at that sensitive time
when early teen boys are becoming young men and girls are turning to women. The
old social arrangement does not apply anymore and every young soul has to fight
for a new place in the pyramid. No wonder that this is when alcohol and drugs
are creeping their way into the young people’s life.
To counter-act the breaking
of the social structure, and to support peer cooperation rather than competition,
group work became the common practice in most middle schools classrooms.
Students sitting in groups of 3-6, ideally learning together and helping each
other… Sounds great? The idea is good. Does it work? For social interaction –
maybe, for academic progress – not quite… The middle school concept that was trying to
ease students’ academic stress and leave more room for socializing and creativity,
affords them complete leisure and laziness.
Over the past several years,
the middle-school system is desperately trying to re-invent itself, as more and
more researches are proving its failure. Schools are trying to have one teacher
teaching several subjects to strengthen teacher-students connection. A typical
combination is one teacher for math and science, and one for social sciences
and language arts. However, due to budget and logistics limitations, other,
strange, combinations exist like English and math or English and Science …
For that purpose, block
scheduling is often prescribed, where students spend two hours, without a break,
in the classroom; a nightmare for teachers and students…
Then there is the “Home Room”
or “Advisory” period. In most high schools it means 5-10 minutes added to first
or second period, dedicated to messages over the laud-speakers and some
administrative errands. In a middle school, however, this special period is
dedicated to teacher-students quality time, sort of bonding together, time for general
education, on top of administrative errands. This period lasts between
30 to 60 minutes every day, but unfortunately is an absolute waste of time.
When asked what they usually do during this time, students’ answer is always
the same – "Nothing!" In the best case a teacher would assign a word-search or a
game… Really? Nothing better to do with 40 precious minutes? No real learning? No
discussions? Nothing to broaden those limited horizons? And if nothing better,
why not add 5-10 minutes to each of the other academic periods?
Then, just recently, another “academic”
activity was added… Breakfast In Class… another mind blowing invention… Why not
have students come 10 minutes earlier and be served at the cafeteria, where it
belongs? Why waste class time! Not to mention the trash, the disrupted learning
atmosphere, the questionable added duty for teachers, the waste of food that big
part of it finds its way to the trash can!
I don’t want to further expand
on the middle school system. Educators understand the problems and try to
provide small changes within the limitations of the system. Teachers are well
aware of the situation; some deal with it somehow, but many leave to seek a job
in a high school, or just quit the education field all together.
Why don’t we go back to the
old system? Politics… and money of course… someone has to admit failure and
someone has to pay for it…
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