Chapter 17: The Truth about Middle School Students

Chapter 17: The Truth about Middle School Students
This chapter was very much about Rick sharing the positive aspects of middle school students; his goal was to dispel any “false” statements that some people may make about adolescent children. He also talks in great detail about how, in most cases, only the negatives are talked about. Rick talks about how people focus on “teen sex, or STDs”; they seem to always talk about all of the negative aspects. He takes painstaking steps to help drive out those notions and to make sure that people focus on thing such as “this student sang at the Kennedy Center” or “this student raised $22,000 for the diabetes foundation”. He does a good job of this by sharing quotes from his “graffiti wall” that he had built in his classroom. The “wall” was a section of the room with blank sheets of paper on it; the students were told they could write anything up on the wall as long as it was ok for your “mother, grandmother, or fellow students could take and would not offend anyone”.

Before reading this chapter, I often thought of many middle school students as immature and excessively talkative – this comes from some bad experiences dealing with middle school students. After reading this chapter, I have a very different opinion of middle school students; I thought that all of the quotes his students wrote about were brilliant, witty, or just flat out funny. I had to agree with him when he said that he often hires middle school students to babysit for his kids because they always want to make people happy and are in constant need for reassurance. I remember being in middle school and it was very important to make sure that you did the things so you could fit in. I think it has to do with paranoia of the age – middle school kids think everyone is watching them at all times; sometimes that makes teaching easier because they think you’ll see everything they are doing at a given time. I feel like many people out there should read this book because they would develop a different opinion of both middle school students and teachers.