Knowing that middle schoolers, even eighth graders, are still the children who played tag at recess a mere three or four years before, is not infantilizing, but humanizing to the young adolescent.
Why K-8 Schools May Be Better For Middle School Students
Claire Needell Hollander is an English teacher at a public middle school in New York City.
Updated December 18, 2012, 2:12 PM
There are compelling reasons to do away with middle schools and to replace them with kindergarten through eighth grade programs. One reason is that in cordoning off this cohort, we are also isolating their teachers, often for their entire careers. This means that a middle school teacher will never have a single professional training session devoted to understanding what children learn in kindergarten through fifth grade. She will never bear witness to the range of intellectual development, or social-emotional development of young children, unless she happens to have children of her own.
This is a significant gap in teacher knowledge, because the young adolescents we spend our days with as middle school teachers are very much like 9- and 10-year-olds, while in other ways they may be more like 15-year-olds. They may be obsessed with the opposite sex, but may still rely on a bit of magical thinking when it comes to learning about difficult topics. They may need to learn hard truths about humanity, may be ready to read "Night," by Eli Weisel, or "The Color Purple," by Alice Walker in eighth grade, but they will write stories about the zombie apocalypse. Middle schoolers can absorb the truth, and spit out almost as much fantasy as insight.
Knowing that middle schoolers, even eighth graders, are still the children who played tag at recess a mere three or four years before, is not infantilizing, but humanizing to the young adolescent. Middle schoolers are proud, of course, of their new status as almost teens, but the almost is what most defines them. When educators are unaware of how developmentally close the middle schooler is to elementary schooler, we miss the opportunity to teach the whole person, both the child who is leaving childhood behind, as well as the young adult who is looking forward to the challenges of independence.