The Middle School Mess: If you love bungee jumping, you're the middle school type

Peter Meyer

"Caught in the hurricane of hormones," the Toronto Star began a 2008 story about students in the Canadian capital's middle schools. Suspended "between childhood and the adult world, pre-teens have been called the toughest to teach."

"The Bermuda triangle of education," former Louisiana superintendent Cecil Picard once termed middle schools. "Hormones are flying all over the place."

Indeed, you can't touch middle school without hearing about "raging hormones."
Says Diane Ross, a middle-school teacher for 17 years and for 13 more a teacher of education courses for licensure in Ohio, "If you are the warm, nurturing, motherly, grandmotherly type, you are made for early childhood education. If you love math or science or English, then you are the high school type. If you love bungee jumping, then you are the middle school type."

Even in professional journals you catch the drift of "middle-school madness." Mayhem in the Middle was a particularly provocative study by Cheri Pierson Yecke published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2005. American middle schools have become the places "where academic achievement goes to die," wrote Yecke.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 1, 2010 6:49 PM
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