She said

Very interesting article in the NYTimes, the first in a series on middle school. The big question: how do you educate kids who are still, in many ways, children, but who are beginning to deal with really grown up problems?

In one of my classes last semester we talked a lot about how school systems tend to treat middle schoolers as either big elementary students or little high schoolers. But they really are a totally different beast. And a friendly beast. Before I started my last student teaching placement (at a school which, incidentally, is mentioned in the NYTimes article), I was sure I was going to hate middle school. But now I'm thinking I may actually want to end up teaching in one.

More to come from Chris, who worked with middle schoolers at a very different school from the one where I was teaching, and still learned to love the beast.