The Purpose of Middle School

After reading this article, it made me reflect back on my student teaching middle school experience. I was at a k-8 middle school that stressed the importance of hardwork and silence. I remember walking through the hallways and it being so quite and then going into my classroom where it was very quiet too. I remember feeling really weirded out the first day of student teaching because it was so quiet and then when I entered the classroom students were working very hard on completing their worksheets. Although everything was in order throughout the school I felt as though students weren't learning how to think critically about why or what they were reading. They were being asked to be producers of worksheets. Now that I am at the high school level teaching, I can see how students from middle school have gotten into the habit of working on completing worksheets. They don't feel comfortable sharing in group discussions or answering questions that ask them to tell me what they feel or think about a particular topic. In fact, the attitude that I've gotten from my students is don't talk to me or teach to me just hand me the worksheet for group work. If this is what we are doing in middle schools then I feel that we are not preparing them for adulthood where they don't question anything or don't know how to question people in authority or themselves about changing things that they are unhappy about.