By Sam Slavin, Yale University student

Two summers I was afraid of a job two blocks away from my house. I was not afraid because the low-income students I was teaching came from a bad neighborhood, but because of what taking this job said about my identity. When you dedicate eight weeks of your life to teaching middle school students, some part of you becomes a middle school teacher—and I do not like thinking of myself as a middle school teacher. Somehow it got lodged in my mind that teaching middle school is a career that does not deserve the lifelong dedication of a well-off boy from Cambridge, MA who will graduate from Yale in a couple years.

In this country, it is an acknowledged fact that teaching middle school is a low-prestige job. When I was applying for the position, the New York Times did a special series on class, in which it compared job prestige with job pay. Sadly, the prestige of middle school teachers was almost as low as their salaries.

The fact that Summerbridge, the program I taught with, ranked among The Princeton Review’s top ten internships was not the reason I chose to take the job. But that it stood alongside the White House, the Supreme Court, and the New York Times certainly helped me feel that the work was worthy of my time. Now, here’s the frustrating issue: when you stick around The White House for your entire life your prestige rating skyrockets, but when you stick around public schools for the rest of your life your rating plummets.

It does not make much sense, but, just like the judges of prestige, I imagined my job at Summerbridge as something special and removed from regular middle school teaching. I did not go into the John M. Tobin School to teach my kids how to write; I went into a classroom to take their naturally vast imaginative capacities and show them how to set their ideas into a clear and intelligent order. I was not going in there to teach my kids how to be quiet and take notes; I was going in there to show them how, in silence, they could pay closer attention to the murmurs of their nascent understanding. I cringed the moment I heard that I would have to sit through workshops on maintaining classroom discipline where they would tell us what to do if one of our students spent the class taping his hand to his shoe. Just like the judges of prestige, I did not want to see my job for what it was—teaching middle school—and, as result, I deluded myself to the point that I did not see my kids for what they were—middle school students.

These delusions hurt my teaching. When I gave my students an assignment that asked them to imagine the piece of technology that they would most like to see invented, they all gave me blank stares. I asked one student who loved Playstation 2, “In the future, what will Playstation 11 look like?” He mumbled a little. Then another student interrupted, “We don’t like imagining things.” That knocked the wind out of me. Where were the incredible minds that I had expected? Where was the unbounded excitement of their thought? I was disappointed, and my students could see it. Students feed off a teacher’s energy just as much as he feeds off the students’. In that moment, the entire class lost it. My expectations were so high that when I fell and hit the ground the thud was loud enough to make the most diligent students push their papers to the side and start giving themselves sharpie-tattoos.

There are many ways to understand my students’ reactions without ruling out the possibility that somewhere inside them they do possess brilliant imaginations. One middle school teacher who was assigned to me as a mentor explained that students are often afraid to share their creative thinking because, unlike their thoughts about another person’s writing, their imagination is entirely their own. Sharing what they have imagined feels like revealing something very personal. If this teacher were in my position, she would probably have continued the activity unfazed, because she has the courage to recognize the students for the struggling pre-adolescents that they are and not for the characters of romantic poetry. If I had had the courage to think this, if I had not let the judges of prestige pressure me into thinking that my job was something other than what it was, I might have been able to maintain my excitement, the kids would have sensed it, and, in the end, I probably would have seen some flashes of youthful creativity.

In my literature class this summer, my second with Summerbridge, when a student does not read her work loud enough, her classmates chant for her to get up on her chair and holler what she has to say. Usually, after several muted “do I have to’s,” she will step up and steady herself on the small, red, plastic seat. Both hands clenching the sides of her overflowing binder, she shouts a word or two then quiets down a little and reads to the end. It is no thunderous pronouncement that shakes the panels of the twenty-five foot high ceiling, but everyone can hear her, and, when she takes a seat again, a few of the other students might give a few silent nods in appreciation of her courage.

Our raucous and perhaps slightly inappropriate chair-standing ritual is just one way that I’ve found to hear more of my students’ voices. Last summer, I would never have dared to begin this tradition, because it was so childish and I was not prepared to see myself as a middle school teacher. After the imagination disaster, I would have been afraid that they would not have anything to say. But by the end of last summer, I knew that I had to come back and give teaching another, more realistic shot. This summer I tried to generate many different situations to listen to my students with the hope that each new way of relating to them might increase my chances of catching of one of those bursts of creativity that would be enough to keep me in the game.

One of my plans was to have individual conferences with each of my students. My aim was to use each meeting to ask the students how they felt in class and to discuss a single homework assignment that focused on the areas where they needed the most improvement. One day I met with a student named SaDaryl, who had difficulty concentrating. He told me that the class was boring and that the things we did were “mad wack.” We had a short discussion about what he disliked, and I explained to him exactly what I had planned for the next day. He listened quietly and nodded as I gave the minute-by-minute breakdown. “That’s good work,” he told me when I finished.

The following day he was eager to participate—until I announced that we were going to do something differently from how I had explained it to him. I had told him that students would be able to spread out to different parts of the room to read a story, but that night I decided that it would be more efficient to keep everyone at the table. He complained that I had changed the plan, so I told him that he could go off (as in the original plan) if he really wanted to. He walked to the farthest corner, lay belly-down atop one of the high lab tables and read silently for the full twenty minutes.

We are often told that there are no bad kids, but when a student spends class hiding under the table, stabbing holes in his binder, or jumping up to write, “SaDaryl is sexy”’ on the board it’s hard to believe everything that we’re told. Yet, when you find that all it takes to calm the wild student is to explain to him what the plan for the next day, it makes you believe that there is more to your students than you think.

And just as there is some reason hidden behind a sixth grader’s craziness (he needs his own space and sense of what is going on), there is hidden creative brilliance as well. During my most successful literature class this year, I had a piece of duct tape covering my mouth. When the class began, the students found a letter from the “kid avenger,” saying that he had taped my mouth shut because I talked too much and that I would have to keep the tape on for as long as they carried on the discussion by themselves. The students called on one another, asked their friends to back up their points with evidence from the story, and elicited further explanation when a student was not making herself clear. Although I had to begin peeling off the tape at a few of the rowdier moments, this small threat was enough to keep them focused, and I went the entire class without saying a word. More often, I had to hold myself back from leaping up, peeling off the tape, and shouting out for joy at the sight of my students pushing one another to improve.

During my second summer of teaching I was able to create a few more situations in which I could see my students’ creativity and intelligence, but these moments were still rare and unpredictable.  I imagine that spending thirty years in the classroom might give me a better sense of what brings these moments about. At the very least, thirty years might be enough time to finally develop a faith in my students deep enough to withstand the vagaries of the middle school mind. I left at the end of my first summer with the conviction that being a better teacher was just a question of developing a tough shell—an ability to say “that’s just how seventh graders are” and continue with a lesson, unfazed. But this summer, when I observed more experienced teachers, I saw that what appeared to be a rough coating was probably supported by a much deeper faith that setting the stage properly could bring out the unexpected in a student.

Last summer, I am not sure that I fully believed that dedicating more time to teaching in a middle school really merited an increase in esteem—some part of me still felt that teachers just had to be tough and truck through the disappointment. But this summer, having witnessed the importance of building faith in my students, I am convinced that every year of dedication must strengthen this belief. Finding new ways to take risks that let the students surprise you is central to being a successful teacher, and from what I’ve experience, it is an art that can be cultivated with time. Sadly, however, I’m still not sure that I could choose to stand up to the judges of prestige and withstand their glare for thirty years until I proved them wrong.

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