I’ve heard
teaching to the middle shouted as a condemnation of teaching as a profession by frustrated parents, and by those who have never been responsible for the intellectual development of any creature more complicated than a schnauzer. I’ve also heard it whispered in resignation by teachers who have recently let their dreams of what classrooms with them at the helm would be like. As a student teacher, during my mostly off-campus senior victory lap at alma mater, I even disdainfully dripped that very phrase all over my ‘reflective journal’ as the type of teaching I despised and would never allow myself to practice.
I had no teaching practice, and little theoretical understanding, but I knew enough to know that
teaching to the middle was reviled as a failure of worse than epic proportions.
I mean, you can kind of admire a teacher who loses it and slaps an abusive parent in front of a roomful of gaping students, or informs a particularly recalcitrant bully that the marines sure do help a person learn how to kill a man quickly, and without leaving pesky telltale marks. We like failures like those; they have pizzazz. But this quiet, banal failure of
teaching to the middle combines the double crime of being both bad and boring. This is almost as heinous an offense as the ridiculous amount of alliteration in that last sentence.
In all my educator classes, I had forgotten to apply some basic skills that being an English major taught me. I never asked the begged questions: why NOT teach to the middle? What does teaching to the middle entail that makes it such a shameful practice? Where should we aim our teaching? Hell, I had forgotten even to define my terms. I, like many with whom I discussed teaching, had in my head a jumble of meanings that were all bad, but not specific. (Think “family values” in reverse.) Teaching to the middle conjures up images of struggling children in the D and E/F range being permitted to struggle on until their spirits break and they get unsightly tattoos and break into their parents’ liquor cabinets. A heartbreaking image to me, and one which has had much play in government-level conversations about ‘what’s wrong with the schools,’ but one which is rarely cited as a primary concern in the general discussions of issues in education in which I have participated. It is the other image I hear about most often, the image of the junior geniuses withering in the corner, desperately wishing for something meaningful to do with all their booored synapses, until their spirits break and they get ironic tattoos and break into their parents’ medicine cabinets.
Imagine my surprise three years in to teaching at the secondary school level (1 year between BA and MA, and two more since MA), in discovering that I really enjoy that very sort of teaching of which I once declared myself an avowed enemy. I teach directly to children “in the middle,” and I do so unapologetically. I sometimes even puff up my chest with pride about it, because I see myself doing some good for some kids who really need some attention. Since NCLB, so much focus is placed on the ‘needs’ and ‘gifts’ of students, and in making education as effective and meaningful for the exceptional students, that the students in the middle are often overlooked.
My students are almost every definition of “middle” that one can conjure up. I teach at a middle school, working with children who are neither children nor adolescent with any consistency, preferring perhaps to vacillate between the two until they find their own comfort zone. In most students, this occurs during the two weeks just prior to the ceremony in which we send them to high school.
My children have also been identified as “average achievers with promise,” and are grouped together in my classes in an effort to fulfill that promise. (Yes, there is still homogeneous grouping. There are just different weasel ways to do it.) Depending on which group of children, “promise” could mean “kids who are technically at academic risk, but close to the ‘not at risk’ line,” or “kids who are super-smart but have parents who don’t or can’t teach them the middle class skills that make the school setting easier to navigate,” or “kids who are achieving at about the expected level, but have real gumption and we think you can do something with them.” I really enjoy these students. Unfortunately, my group also occasionally includes “kids who are super-smart but lazy as all get out and have inherited ridiculous entitlement issues from their equally obnoxious parents.” (Meh, no job is perfect.)
Often my children are in the middle socioeconomically, as well. They are first generation Americans working on learning English so they can teach it to their parents. They are first generation suburbanites, displaced from their DC homes by gentrification, or displaced from their farming communities by exurban sprawl. They are first generation middle class who have watched as their parents worked their way up the chain in the armed services or at their corporate jobs, and are now expected to do what their parents never did: get a college education. Some of them are first generation upper-middle class, and look on in confusion as their parents and I talk about budgeting our babysitting/lawn care money to pay for school clothes, and maybe even the movies, too. Many of them want very badly to be “tough outta soufEAST,” but they aren’t even fooling me, and I grew up in a town specifically created as a safe little bubble in which to raise naïve children.
They are also the children who tend to get lost, forgotten about in all the initiatives to make school a fairer place for the exceptional. Principals, in the pressure to meet shifting data requirements or lose funding, lose staff and possibly get fired, learn quickly. One of the things they learn is that “achievers” (who can easily be made to achieve more) shift the data as much or more than an average kid who “gets it.” So, the advanced children can carry you if you let them. Special needs children who gain proficiency help you meet data requirements in two ways: you need them to “get it” to make AYP, and they tend to bring your average up quite a bit, too!
And, you know what? The exceptional absolutely need to have their needs met by public education. But we have become so enamored of the exceptional that we forget that most of our children are in some way or another average. Not mediocre, not sub-par, not unexceptional: average. And those children might be able to be coaxed into exceptional, or they may stay average, but they need to be educated fairly and well. The way that NCLB is currently structured, that’s not exactly happening. At least it isn’t happening everywhere. The punitive side of NCLB doesn’t allow the freedom to make the kinds of choices that would make education fair for the unexceptional in communities like the one I teach in. Right now, the schools are just trying to make the numbers work well enough to keep the feds off their backs, and that doesn’t serve our kids.
Labels: NCLB, Teaching
