What Every Middle School Teacher Should Know

After interviewing the five students, I found some patterns in their responses that I think would be important for me to know as a future teacher. These patterns include what the students worry about, want to achieve, and how they feel. One pattern I found that continued to occur throughout the interview was that the students were concerned about getting good grades. Each student that I interviewed wanted to get good grades for themselves, for their parents to be proud, and so their teachers were not disappointed. I remember when I was a young adolescent; I always wanted to get good grades for those reasons. Another pattern that I thought was interesting was that the students find chores and early bedtimes to be the worst thing about being

An important pattern that I learned from the interview is that the students all seem to enjoy playing soccer or some type of sport. This is significant that a future teacher knows this information because then the teacher can try to incorporate it into the lesson to make the lesson more fun and relatable to the students’ lives. In the book, What Every Middle School Teacher Should Know, it states “The most important thing a middle school student should do or learn in school is… social interactions along with social responsibility” (Brown et al., 2014, p. 35). This is vital information that a teacher knows because it will allow the teacher to focus on material other than the curriculum while teaching. Also, from the interviews I noticed that most of the books and shows that the students read/watched were relatable to their lives and were about children their own age. A teacher can use and build this information into their lessons because material would be more interesting to the children if they are able to relate to

One of the biggest patterns that I found while doing my interviews is that the students love when people are nice and kind to them. In different questions, the answers that the students give revolve around how they want people to be nicer or how they enjoy school because people are nice. The book mentions that “They begin to see that some kids are popular while others aren’t. They question where they stand and wonder what their peers think of them” (Brown et al., 2014, p. 37). This is important for teachers to realize because not every middle school student will be nice and it is the teachers’ job to create a safe environment for every student and make sure that everyone is being nice. As a future teacher, it was fascinating to see a pattern about what type of material the students are interested in learning about. The students had a pattern of saying material that usually is not taught or really focused on in class. As a future teacher, I can use this information when I begin teaching because I can ask my students what they want to learn about. In my host classroom, the students were always asking questions and very curious about