The Problem with Middle Schoolers

So I figured out what the problem with middle schoolers is. Ok, elementary schoolers love you, so they listen and pay attention. High schoolers want you to love them, so they listen and pay attention. Middle schoolers could care less about you; they only want their friends to love them. So they don’t listen or pay attention. Epiphany #1.

Epiphany #2: I’ve been doing everything I learned in my teacher education classes never to do: punishing the whole class when just one or two students are acting out, yelling over kids, not waiting for complete silence before beginning to speak, and keeping kids in from recess (they say that the reason they are acting out is because they need more recess time…never ending cycle of them acting out and staying in from recess…). On the bright side, I’m definitely not trying to be friends with my students (which is ironic because the argument always was that “you don’t need them to be your friends because you already have friends”…and I don’t actually have friends…). Anyway, the thing is is that the things they tell you to do don’t actually work. I’ve tried doing countdowns, giving kids “the look,” calling on kids to give me an answer to keep them on task and not disrupt the class, moving closer to disruptive kids, pausing, praising the good kids, etc. The issue is that if I wait for silence I wait for the whole forty minute class period and we get nothing done. (Besides, I always hated those teachers who would stand in front of the class and be like, “I’ll wait” and I swore to myself I’d never do that.)

On the other hand, I actually think I did laugh in my 7^th grade class the other day. So we were in spelling class (forty minutes of spelling is quite brutal, I have to admit), and I decided to have them “act out” their spelling words. So, if the letter was “normal” (like an a or an e) they put their hands on their hips, if it went up (like an f or an h) they put their hands up, and if it went down (like a j or a q), they touched the floor. Ok, so it sounds like something 3^rd graders would do, but they act like 3^rd graders anyway and besides I was at the end of my rope. So the funny thing is I think they actually all did it—and cheered and clapped at the end of each word. It was actually really funny! So who knows if it will actually help them remember the words (doubtful), but at this point I could care less because for once they weren’t running amok. Small victories. So, epiphany #3: I figured out that when they don’t pay attention in my class it’s because my class is boring.

In other news, it is hotter than blazes. People keep laughing at me when I say this because they tell me this the cool season, but I’m literally dying of heat stroke over here. I usually take two showers every day because by the time I get home I’m drenched in sweat. I’m actually really grateful for the cold water; honestly, even if we had hot water I wouldn’t use it! I’ve ran like twice I think—once I lasted 20 minutes; the other time I lasted 10. And speaking of showers, I opened the shower curtain the other day to find a HUGE tarantula in there. Ok I know I like to exaggerate but it was literally the size of my fist. The biggest I’ve seen. I about flipped my lid. I had to call my host mom in to kill it (embarrassing, I know), and she stepped on it, which I would have been nervous doing because it was about the size of my foot.

Also, last Saturday I went with my host dad and two host brothers to a guy’s house from their church for a guys’ Bible study. A lot of women went too just to hang out during the study. His house was on a farm like an hour away up in the mountains—it was sweet. It was a really tiny house but with a bunch of property. And it was cooler up there and they had a hammock! So I guess it’s the corn harvest right now, which is apparently a bd. They just kept bringing out and serving us more and more corn stuff! So I tried elote (corn on the cob that everyone thinks is great but doesn’t even compare to the corn in the U.S.), atol (a corn pudding thing with cinnamon that is really sweet and good at first but you can only eat so much of it), tamalindos (mashed up corn with a little thicker consistency than cream-of-wheat), and fritos (fried corn paddies). It was all pretty good, but, let’s be real, you can only have so much corn.