“A story a former school administrator tells emphasizes the need young adolescents have for self examination. . . . Annoyed by the students’ need to leave the room during lessons, the teachers were looking for solutions. The perceptive principal asked the central office administrator to purchase mirrors for every classroom. The mirrors were placed strategically inside the door of each classroom. The result was an amazing drop in the number of student requests for restroom breaks” (Brown 13).

This passage struck a chord with me. In my undergraduate education program, I took a class called Middle School Philosophy and Application. In this course, these were the exact types of issues we discussed. Our professor did a phenomenal job stressing the developmental needs of middle schoolers and how we as teachers needed to put our “academic agendas” aside sometimes to consider what’s best for the students. She even quoted this mirror example in class several times. Later in the article it also mentions the students’ physical growth and how that makes them restless, which is why middle school should ideally include movement, whether it be opportunities for movement in the classroom, or PE and recess throughout the day. 

The reason this passage hits me so hard is because I worked for “no excuse” charter schools for the previous three years before starting grad school. When I first entered this environment, I felt guilty about the rules I was enforcing. I knew many of the strategies we were using went against all of the developmental needs of the middle schoolers as I had learned in this particular course. The general environment of the school—when it’s functioning correctly—is one of rigidity, structure ,and a hyper-focus on time, using every second of time to its fullest and never “wasting” a second. This encourages inflexible lessons, often requiring 6th and 7th grade students to sit silently for entire periods with little autonomy. Even getting up to sharpen their pencil is considered a burden to the teacher and the precious “time.”

Teaching in this environment filled me with such guilt that I had to email my former professor, as if to ask for forgiveness or maybe seek some validation from her. (She was understanding and reminded me that there are multiple approaches to education and some kids function better in different environments.) However, the longer I spent in this environment, the more I pitied my students and how we as a school were not meeting their needs. In the specific example quoted in my MVP, we not only didn’t have mirrors in the classrooms, but the students didn’t even have mirrors in the bathroom (I never found out why). We had regimented times for students to use the bathroom so they would not go during class, which would be, of course, a waste of precious “time.” I sometimes felt like we had created the worst environment developmentally for our middle schoolers.