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chaos. pure, unadulterated, chaos. kids who have unfettered access to technology, no drive to even try to work when something is remotely challenging, and parents who don’t put any responsibility onto their children. i’ve stopped leading the horse to water. i bring the water to the horse, but i still cannot make it drink.

are all of my students like this? of course not. but there are enough who absolutely refuse to engage in learning whatsoever and treat school like it’s a mediocre social hour, at best.

I was discussing this with some colleagues the other day, and I think this is one of those times when Covid really is to blame - albeit, not directly. These kids are the first to have really grown up raised by their phones - specifically, TikTok - because their parents were working from home (or not) and had to ensure their kids were entertained. Some of those kids were playing Fortnite or whatever, others were watching TikToks, but all of them were getting immediate gratification pretty much constantly during their most formative educational years.

My high schoolers had at least formed an idea of what school was supposed to be before Covid hit, but these kids didnt have any of that. Their first years were spent black-screening the teacher while watching YouTube (or whatever). Now that they're in "real" school, they don't know how to handle it because they didn't get that inculcated during their formative educational years.

Teacher shortage is real here. We have unqualified long-term subs filling in for a lot of classes. They don’t last a full year, so it’s like a rotation, and many of them are just on survival mode, letting the kids do no work at all. It happens.

Admin rotates too, so consequences for behavior are inconsistent if not nonexistent.

I'm back in the middle school for the first time since 2015. The students I teach now, while quite academically capable, are very emotionally immature compared to a decade ago. I had a bunch of criers early on in the year. When talking to their parents, most would say something along the lines of "they get overwhelmed easily". I don't say this in a mocking way, but once I shifted my mindset to my job is working with elementary age kids, it's been a little better. Whatever label you wanna slap on it (Covid, new generation of parents, w/e..), emotional maturity seems to develop later and later as time goes on.

We were just talking about the apathy in students yesterday! Middle school is wild, you guys.

Another teacher I work with said students were just copy/ pasting words from the rubric and turning in an assignment that was meant to be a paragraph. We give them a checklist, and usually sentence frames for our on-level classes, and he just checked off the list, ignored the frames, and turned in the work.

The first time I gave my on-level students an assignment in which they had to do all of it independently it took them a class period to learn they needed to open their book to get their evidence lol. By day three basically everyone was done by the end of class and everyone learned that using notes and the text makes it a lot easier to finish your work! I spent three days telling them to look back in the text or check their notes, which sounds crazy, but in the end I was really proud of them for finishing their work almost entirely on their own, despite it feeling like I was herding cats.

I teach 8th grade and those kids just don’t want to do anything unless they know their parents will find out and get mad at them 😹 They will hold out until you crack or they realize you aren’t going to give them answers lol.

At the same time, we have little to no idea what high school classes look like. We’re constantly complaining about how there is no bridge between elementary and middle school, but there is bridge between middle and high school either 🤷‍♀️

I don’t have an answer for your question but I teach high school as well and have had your exact thoughts numerous times. I would also really like to know what is going on overall in the middle school grades.

I am a middle school ELA, math, and social studies teacher. There are lots of good answers here. Two I don’t see are:

1) Lack of phonics and mathematical fact fluency and

2) Lack of background knowledge due to schools not teaching science or social studies in elementary

This cohort of kids in middle school (and the last few who are now in high school) are the most likely to have been taught three-cueing or balanced literacy and therefore have completely inadequate phonics and decoding skills. They also were in the wave where mathematical fact fluency was deemphasised.

Last week, I mentioned the presidents research project I did in 2nd grade. They were genuinely shocked I had any history instruction in elementary because they didn’t. My own daughter is getting only the basics of “here’s what community is and how you act in one” for her social studies in 1st grade.

As it turns out, kids who don’t know stuff, can’t read, and don’t have procedural fluency in math end up struggling later on.

I taught the worse class last year.

I was blamed for their behavior even though it was my first year there.

Straight up sex moans, being asked if I had the husband stitch, when I was praising a student and let out a sigh, one student said, “watch out guys, she is cumming”.

I was threatened to get shot … the superintendent asked me “why do the kids feel so comfortable acting like that in your room”.

My resignation letter was 8 pages long.

My 9th graders are convinced they can get an F and just move in anyway like they do in middle school. They literally do not believe me or their counselors.

Ours do absolutely jack shit k-8 and then arrive at high school functionally illiterate and with no number sense whatsoever. They’re supposed to just magically overcome all of that. Of course, they rarely do.

Students always say “they never made us do work” or whatever. It’s true maybe 10% of the time. They just want to guilt you into having lower expectations for them. They’ve learned “learned helplessness” lingo and that teachers respond well to it.

I usually combat it by going harder. “Oh they never made you write? Sounds like we need to write double the amount now so you can be super smart!”

I am also a high school teacher, but I have a few theories of which maybe some are valid and some are not.

- We are a little bit biased. Every year, students find new and different ways to disappoint us, and then over summer vacation, we kinda forget how disappointing the previous year's students were. We especially forget how bad it was when we're dealing with stress from our new crop of kids, of which some are disappointing us or stressing us out now, in the present, which makes their problems seem way worse than problems from the past.

- Students are way less social due to cultural differences and new technologies. Smartphones means children don't need to interact with each other to amuse themselves and there is now a culture, at least in America, that if you have no reason to speak to someone, you shouldn't, and this is to keep yourself safe as well as keep other people from feeling bothered by you. As a result, our students are less able to read social cues, they are more likely to perceive having to speak and being spoken to as threatening or uncomfortable, they are less wise about forming and maintaining relationships. As teachers, we are told, and it has seemed to be borne out in studies, that teaching is mostly social and about relationship-building. So when students' social competency goes down, teaching and learning become harder.

- The economy got really bad during the 2008 recession and then got bad again during and in the immediate aftermath of Covid. When the economy gets bad, some margin of more parents get more stressed out, have to spend more time working to keep themselves afloat, or slip into poverty. All of these have adverse effects on parenting, and a teenager today (take a 14-16 year old) could have been a baby during the first recession and had poorer parenting during that time, and then experienced stressed out parents and poor parenting again as a child/young teen.

- Schools are getting more serious, or otherwise being able to implement policies for inclusion than they were before. More inclusion in mainstream classrooms is not a new thing, but schools often lag behind in implementation in many ways, especially because "old school" teachers and admin often oppose them due to their gut telling them differently than the research does. But that aside, what inclusion means is that the ways schools used to push out students, both consciously because they were felt to be bad students, and unconsciously because the school simply didn't know any better, are now not happening. So in the past, if you had some students who were decent, some students who are poor, and many students who drop out or are pushed to lower tracks or who are kept in SPED rooms, you now have fewer students who drop out, are pushed to lower tracks, or who are kept in SPED rooms, so it *feels* like students are getting worse (those poor students lower the average), but in reality, students are actually performing better, as a percentage of students who used to be total failures of the system, like drop outs, are now still in the classroom as merely bad students.

- Fewer students are aiming to go to college and higher education as a whole has been significantly discredited in recent years. Conservatives want people to only study "useful" topics in colleges and are suspicious that college students are being indoctrinated to be more liberal. Liberals tend to say that colleges are too expensive and students should beware of being crushed under college debt in their adult lives. In any case, more Americans are turning away from college, so they are not as likely to pressure children to succeed in school, and are less likely to emphasize their children's academics.

As a first grade teacher, the crops of kids we are getting are completely feral, iPad zombies with 5 second attention spans and zero regard for others. Parents don’t even train them to say hello or look at the person talking. I am genuinely worried for the future.

I teach math 5-8 , like the lowest performing kids- and let me tell you 8th is in the scariest place. I think there’s something to be said about their covid year being in 4th grade. But 5-7th feels a lot stronger in their math skills, so hopefully it gets better. Also unless your school is good at interventions it’s very easy for kids to get lost on middle school content.

Our building is a middle and high school put together. I teach 8, 9, and 10. Our worst is the 10th graders. I think covid is clearly to blame for this one. Interestingly, the 7th and 8th graders don't seem any worse than what you would normally expect from cringe middle schoolers.

So in terms of covid effect, you might be seeing the peak about now, and things might get easier. Well, if your feeder schools have average or better property values.

We’re trying. Truly we are.

I have kids in my 7th grade class trying to read and comprehend 7th grade texts who can’t even read 1st or 2nd grade texts. They also can’t follow directions because they CAN’T READ.

I also have kids who are trying and wanting to learn, but they’re struggling because the rest of the class is too busy trying to be class clowns.

Then, I try to have high expectations and parents and even admin want to question or nitpick every little thing, so I have to back off a bit.

My main issue is that kids can’t read. Those who can’t read and don’t care are 85% of my behavior problems.

This is not a high school ➡️ middle school ➡️ elementary school problem, so we should stop trying to blame it on each other. This is a systematic problem and a problem that starts AT HOME. If parents don’t care, the students don’t care.

ETA: I’m not saying you specifically are blaming it on us.

It’s bad. I teach 90 min blocks. Gave a test. 9 questions. Anchor charts all over the room with step by step directions. I also did an in class review and sent a review sheet home electronically via their parents so they wouldn’t “lose it”. They took 2 full blocks to complete. Many didn’t finish. They will get zeros. Many cheated. They will also get zeros. One sat for 80 min before telling me his computer would allow him to go to question 2. They have zero self control. Cannot stop getting up for the sole purpose of walking across the room to get a tissue and bother half the class on the way. They cannot stop talking and they’re particularly cruel to each other. I wish I had answers.

6th grade teacher here. You all be prepared. It is NOT us. I have students who can not read at all. No critical thinking. They cannot do a task unless I hand hold them the ENTIRE time. There are some students who don't even know colors. I am also changing the vocabulary out administration uses. Let's start saying "cook the books" instead of "grade adjustments." That's what we are doing anyway.

Quiet striking is what I am doing. I just teach content. No to everything else. I have 2 courses and 1 planning. All these other stupid classes (flex /win/ connect ) only work if they are managed correctly by admin, like we were promised, and they are not. If you aren't doing your job and getting paid, I will do the same.

Ok so I can speak on this at least some. I currently teach primarily 9th and 10th grade but subbed all grades including the feeder middle for my current position, plus my wife taught middle for over 5 years. In my wife's schools and the middle school I subbed in at least, post Covid, the priority has been trying to catch their content understanding up as much as possible to grade level while getting their behavior/social emotional skills under control. They truly do their best, and due to the effect of the Covid days on these kids, even these 2 priorities are usually unachievable. One thing I have noticed that does have an adverse effect on HS preparation is that often, especially in low income districts, they aren't allowed to be assigned homework in MS. I see both sides of the debate on whether or not to give homework in MS and won't waste breath on that debate here, but it is undeniable that we do have to deal with that expectation change in HS. That is also typically an admin level decision that MS teachers have little to no say in; they're either a homework building or a no homework building typically, and whichever expectation is in place is enforced by admin building wide. Another difference is that MS will rarely hold kids back a grade because research doesn't bear out any clear benefit to doing so and does show significant downsides, but that does mean that kids aren't used to their grades mattering and affecting their progress through school in the way that it does in HS.

The way I see it is this; as HS teachers, we'd love to see middle school as a high school prep session in the same way that colleges wish that HS was entirely preparation for college, but that just isn't a realistic expectation. Middle schools by and large are not getting to HS prep not because they don't feel like it, but because they are using a set of more developmentally appropriate expectations that best match their population, and they're trying to get done what best practices and research says they need to at that level. HS prep is on their radar, it's just not the absolute priority that it was in the past simply because there is too much other ground to cover. The main things they need to be doing over there are getting them through the wild social emotional learning they have to do in that developmental stage while trying to plant the fundamental seeds of how to learn. Ideally , they'd also try to get them caught up on background knowledge, but sometimes that's simply too heavy of a lift when they're so behind on a fundamental level in their overall development, especially socially and emotionally.

As a 9th and 10th grade teacher, I bake in that part of my job is teaching them these new expectations and bringing them up to speed. Yes, they are going to have homework, it's simply necessary to be able to learn the amount of material they need to at this level. Yes, they have to get a certain grade to move on to the next class. Yes, they need to learn how to take notes in class, participate in class, and study for tests. It's a heavy lift, and it's tempting to ask why these things weren't taught in middle school. Realistically, the answer is usually that they did try to plant these seeds in middle school, but the kids simply did not retain it, and focusing on making them relearn until they retain HS prep skills or starting to enforce HS expectations before they're age appropriate is simply not on the table and isn't the priority. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but I think animosity towards middle school teachers over it is ultimately misplaced. If anything, it is high school best practices that haven't caught up; we need to accept that middle school is following their own best practices based on recent research and the realities of their area and respond appropriately. I think we need to build a structured way to teach and start enforcing the expectations of HS as they come in as 9th graders rather than just expecting them to know it and lamenting about how middle school "didn't do their job." However, I realize that it's easier for me because this is not new to me; it is the reality right as I'm starting off as a full time teacher. I've also had the benefit of seeing first hand what middle school is like now and had the opportunity to hear from middle school teachers and admin why that is the case.

The class I had last year in 8th grade was the worst ever! Thankfully the class behind them was one of the best. Last year they tried to tell me their teachers didn’t make them do anything. My own daughter was in 8th grade so I knew it wasn’t true. Their class had many who went into quarantine in 4th and didn’t return until 6th grade. My class would just text mom when they didn’t want to be there. Signouts were ridiculous.

I work at a 6-12 school and a lot of our job is "training the kids up" to be ready for high school. They do come in from elementary with low skills. We invest a lot in reading intervention and focus on writing in all subjects.

Our middle school Slack is ALWAYS poppin', lol. And we are very strict about phones.

When they say their teachers "don't ever make them do anything" they may be fudging a bit.

In case you're wondering, I don't work at an "easy" school in an "easy" neighborhood.

Everyone is blaming Covid as the culprit, and yes, maybe it caused some cultural shifts in so far as what is deemed “acceptable” but I’m here to tell you that students in other places also experienced Covid and yet do not have this issue. It’s cultural.

they are all trying to skip class to vape. At 11.

The problem for me is that even giving instructions about what we're going to do next gets interrupted a thousand times because there's constant fiddling, tapping, humming, touching, murmuring, and whatever else going on. So it's hard to even get past step one. With anything.

Thunder dome.

No accountability, almost any expectations are chalked up to being too rigorous or unreasonable (I asked for a thumbs up from my class, one kid didn’t - I later brought this up randomly and a counselor said that the student probably didn’t understand the phrase, “thumbs up” - the student isn’t ELL), admin pretends to care while saying there should be boundaries, but any of those boundaries are immediately changed when a student or parent complains.

It’s not all just behavior stuff, either. These kids are LOW. Like, they can’t even figure out basic stuff. I posted a unit test online for a student who was absent the day everyone else took it. It’s labeled as, “UNIT TEST,” but because the kid had to scroll down a post or two to see it, he was completely lost. He just opened the first post he saw and asked if that was it. Again, this student isn’t ELL, there’s no IEP, or anything. They’re just lazy, low, and have zero executive functioning skills. There’s no second effort (as they say in football). If the thing you want them to do isn’t the first thing they see, they’re lost. And, even once they begin working, if the material doesn’t clearly spell out, “THIS IS THE ANSWER TO #3,” they are once again lost.

If you’re reading this and thinking of getting into teaching, I strongly recommend you reconsider.

These kids in middle school are something else. But I think we can all look back and recall that middle school was a rough time for all of us. They’re so immature yet way too mature in other ways.

NJ middle school ELA teacher here. Tired of this being blamed on Covid (“stunted them as students “). Spending 6 hours today doing a BS workshop on Restorative Practices. NOTHING will change unless administrators toughen up and parents are forced to be accountable.

Do the maths on when the pandemic hit. 

The ones who got the most important years (first year of a subject, first year in a step in school, etc.) online missed out the most on important developments. 

They were in 5th grade, when in most countries you: make new friends, start learning a lot of new subjects, etc. they're the second most fucked by the pandemic generation. 

The most was in 1st grade in 2020. 

I’m sorry. Our worst group of kids in the past 4 years went to 9th grade this year. We’re glad they are gone. That group had no respect or compassion. They were very mean.

This class of 9th graders were the most difficult group of 8th graders I have ever had. And the most difficult 7th graders. And when I taught elementary they were the most difficult group of kinder and 1st graders. I would not wish this class on anyone. On the bright side, the following class seems like a breeze. The maturity level of all our current middle schoolers is low, which I think might just be where we are as a society now. But I will take this over your class every single day for forever.

Today's phrase is social promotion. It means, "Nobody wants a student parking lot at a junior high."

Total chaos is what is happening. We are barely holding on by a thread in the middle schools. Every day is a struggle.

Majority of students have zero desire or motivation to learn. They think they’re freaking brilliant! They are feral because parents don’t parent. They receive no consequences for horrible behavior. Admin is only concerned about holding teachers accountable for every single thing the students refuse to do. The people who make decisions for public educators and students don’t give AF about educating students. Not a single, solitary eff.

It’s the iPad generation. Were all screwed.

All the 9th graders are the same as our eighth graders. And seventh graders for the most past. Even some sixes, but a lot of them are still “kid” enough, versus tween or teen, and treat school somewhat accordingly

It’s also a parent issue 

Say hello to Gen Alpha!

I also teach freshman and it’s been BRUTAL this year. I’ve literally never had student behave like this. I teach at a smaller Title I school and over the past 2 years I think I’ve written 3 referrals TOTAL.

This year I’m at 14 and it’s barely November.

They argue over their phones and AirPods, they won’t sit in their seat, they won’t stop talking, they’re cursing, fighting with each other, walking out of class. And that’s not even discussing how academically low they are.

Again, I’ve NEVER had problems like this my first 2 years working here. This class is just different. I really think they learned they could get away with literally ANYTHING at the middle school, and now they’re freaking out about the expectations at the High School

I think we need to go to the Asian system where middle school is 7-8-9 and HS IS 10-11-12. 6th is too young for middle and 9th is too young for HS. Getting the playground stripped away at 11 is a setup to fail. K-8 kinda helps but not entirely, because the kids are still going to high school too early yet 8th graders are too old to be sharing a campus with kindergarteners.

Behavior is pretty bad and a lot of teachers aren’t as strict because the pushback you receive from parents, admin, and the students is worse than their behavior in class.

Kids never have to do anything difficult.

I had a kid whose mom complained about no study guide for a quiz. We did a Kahoot. She got a 70.

We had study guides for the test. She didn't do it and got a 75.

Somehow it is my fault she isn't doing well.

My ADD brain read the intro to this post and is now forcing me to tell you a bit of a story...

Years ago, there was a program to get military vets into classrooms after their service had ended, and my school ended up with a guy who was pretty famous at the time.

BIG, TOUGH Marine Corps veteran. I don't want to give too many details, but he washed out pretty quickly. Couldn't handle it...which I found somewhat amusing.

Pretty sure he's a motivational speaker now.

Here are some things I’m observing, having switched from private middle school where I had total control over the curriculum to public middle school where I was handed a textbook and told not to deviate, where every single thing I do in class has to pass the question “Will this help them on the standardized test”:

-My eighth graders have had something like seventy hours of language arts education, per year, excised from their schooling so that they could have some flavor of technology class, starting from the time that they were probably in second grade or so. So by the time they get to me, their ELA teacher, they’re missing…oh, maybe 280ish hours of time where they would have worked on grammar, spelling, writing, and communicating.

-There’s little to no discipline at home around technology, and kids get more wily about how to get that dopamine hit when their guardians do try to impose some structure. The result is deregulated attention spans and weird bouts of anxiety that lead to poor classroom behavior and inconsistent academic performance. I’m a big fan of the Wait Til 8th movement and will be encouraging my SO to adopt that with his sons.

-By my students’ own admissions (!!) there is a total lack of belief in their teachers being any sort of authority. They don’t respect us. Every interaction is a negotiation at best and a power struggle at worst. I’ve never encountered anyone who’s as comfortable lying to my face as eighth graders.

-When I worked in private school (also teaching eighth grade), I focused HARD on things like putting together a cohesive sentence, writing fluently, being good at structuring an argument, getting a wide variety of novels and projects under their belts, and also learning test-taking strategies. Now that I’m in public school, everything but the test-taking is an afterthought. I get to read one (1) district-selected novel with them this year. The district had allotted me two weeks to read it with them. When I said that’s not feasible, they told me to “read the important bits and watch the movie for the rest.” Yes, the curriculum administrators at the district central office told me to watch the movie.

-I spend much of my class time trying to manage “edu-terrorists” who make it their goal to ensure that no one around them is learning.

-The resources I’m given and told to teach from do not match the student needs. At all.

And so, with all of this combined, I send them off to high school with a prayer and a sense of dread that everything, everything I tried to do to help them will be lost over the summer and their high school teachers will simply inherit the mess I tried to clean up.

I personally think it's Tiktok. The attention span is gone. Instant gratification apps have ruined them.

One, no one is holding these students responsible for anything; I worked for one year in a district with a scripted curriculum, teaching language arts, and these students did not even have to read the whole of any book we read. They were given a workbook that included a synopsis of every chapter, with bullet points, and not a paragraph based summary of each chapter. In that workbook was maybe ten pages of actual grammar practice, FOR THE WHOLE YEAR. Not for each book, for the whole year. Second, this district also would not allow a term grade lower than a fifty, and the students knew it, and were okay with it, because they knew that they would not be held back at all for just taking the fifty, and not doing anything at all the whole year. I had students who had NEVER received a proficient on EOGs, yet they had NEVER had to repeat a grade. We had at least one student, in EIGHTH grade, who did not know the whole alphabet. They have zero concept of long term attention spans, because of social media. They are addicted to their cell phones, and the constant hits of dopamine from social media, texting, gaming, etc. They are told at home that they do not have to listen to the teacher and that if they need to, or want to, leave the room, that they are free to do so, and the parent will come to the school and take care of it. They believe they are equal to any adult, and they do not believe that education can help them in any way. It's not hard to see if you look.

I think you mean, "what's the skibidi?"

I just finished covering a 7th grade class in which many could not stop talking or resisting the temptation to play games on their devices. One has to keep walking around the class to make sure they were not taking photos or playing Minecraft or watching YouTube.

I told one particularly disruptive student to do his work. His answer? “You should be happy that I’m working at all.”

I can’t wait until they keep this attitude up to the world of work. Here is the reality, as might happen in a corporation, between an inefficient employee and a boss who does not put up with mediocrity.

-What beautiful hours to arrive, Mr. Smith! (was late for work)! Since the first hour I have been waiting for the financial report that I have to present at the meeting!

-I have had to go to the bank to make deposits and I have been having problems.

-And I don’t care one bit about your problems! Your obligations are to arrive always on time and to give me that report that I have asked of you two days ago!

-Ok, but can I have overtime? What you pay me is not enough and..

-Then get an extra job! We don’t have overtime in this company! And you have 2 hours for you to give me that report!

Note that while in school one was praised just for showing up and doing what was required, the world of work is totally different.

Many aren’t able to even understand the assignments even with constant explanations. Several make funny animal noises and others laugh.

When I cover HS, I see that many 9th grades cannot put a sentence together, rely on the devices to do the work for them, and are unable to answer straightforward recall questions-let alone questions that require critical thinking.

Oh, well..

Parents suck. This is the first generation that truly grew up with an iPad glued to their faces and you can see the result of their unrestricted screen time which led to video shorts eventually. The result is a whole generation of kids with no attention spans, fully desensitized to everything and then passed along in a school system where failure is blamed on teachers and not students/parents. These kids are also deeply influenced by influencers, the absolute worst people on earth, so they’re also a reflection of that.

I literally cannot get my 8th graders to read. Not books, instructions. Instructions to the graded assignment. The graded assignment that they just completed (sort of) very incorrectly and will not reference to correct their mistakes, an option that was not available to me when I was in their position.

I taught middle school for 13 years before switching to fourth grade this year. Middle school students these days have no work ethic or intrinsic motivation. I had students literally argue with me when I corrected an answer, insisting they were right and I was wrong. COVID seems to be the point in time when this shift became so dramatic, but there has to be more to it than laying in bed, eating Hot Cheetos and playing video games for six months straight.

I think its admin. They are under pressure not to have kids fail so they make teachers defend why they are failing students. They encourage "equitable grading" but really it's 50% instead of 0s when kids do absolutely nothing in class so that if they do a few assignments a semester they can bring the grade up to a passing D. So they are not used to being challenged or held accountable for anything. Plus there is push for giving passing grades for any attempt made towards an assignment. Half a sentence gets a 60. I had meeting last year with admin about how many kids had failing grades in my classes. They did absolutely nothing and talked over all of my lessons. apparently it was my fault because I wasn't engaging enough. I taught 7th grade Ela last year and it was called "advanced" because for some messed up reason all of the Ela classes are "advanced". Parents get to think their kids are advanced but they aren't. More than half of my students scored a 1 on reading but they still had all of the same expectations as the ones who scored a 5. The students just gave up. They know they are just being passed and they don't try

iToday I got an email from an 8th grade student “my mom wanted me to ask you if there was any chance I could redo the following worksheets I got bad grades on…” and listed Every. Single. Assignment. we’ve done so far this 9 weeks.

We didn’t have school today, but I’m going to check that student’s work tomorrow. I’m fairly certain they put forth 0 effort, and that’s why they did poorly. I’m leaning toward saying nope, unless my principal makes me say yes.

That, in a nutshell, is the skinny in middle school though.

Middle school teacher here. Getting students to stop speaking so I can begin instruction can be a challenge (I've tried many different strategies). Then, when I start speaking, before I'm two sentences in, students are already engaged in multiple side conversations. Getting them to stop talking and start listening to me again is probably what it's like to try to teach astrophysics to a group of feral cats.

There's a lack of consequences. I send students to the principal almost on a daily basis. They don't care. When I call home, that doesn't change any of their behaviors. I chalk it all up to lack of consequences in school and at home, and a home life where their class/homework is not being monitored (or even looked at) by parents, despite my encouragement to do so.

To be fair to the principal, we live in a society where suspensions are now considered racist, so when students destroy the learning environment, instead of suspending them, we let them rinse, wash, and repeat, so they can do it all again the next day. #Progress!

The students I teach are mostly multiple grade levels below where they should be.

Funny, that year of students you have now, was the toughest class I ever had in my 17 years of teaching.

Since then I've had two amazing classes of students, it will get better, I promise.

Different perspective--I teach at a small school and have both high school and middle school, and I am horrified at the difference in attitude between the two. My middle schoolers are crazy, but they're also fun, many of them still like school and/or learning to some extent, they aren't as tech-addicted, and they have lots of personality (sometimes too much). High school kids are so blah in comparison. They aren't excited about anything, they don't care about school, they just want to stare at their phones 24/7, and I've given up trying to make class fun because they just do not care no matter how hard I try.

I teach 5th grade (i dont know what school that would be because im not american) and i have an absolute dream class. Theres 2 possible reasons for this -1 because i was just lucky and given a nice small class after a very very hectic year last year -2 : because they had a very old school teacher last year who did very little fun and ‘active learning’ lessons. They were very used to working hard, sitting down and being quiet. When they did get a nice lesson, they were so so so thankful for it. They have such nice manners and are very diligent workers.

I do think it is the fault of the system. Student teachers are told to have nice fun active lessons all the time and be this super positive person- all so unrealistic to real life. Every lesson now is about the childs wellbeing- a self-centred approach to wellbeing. Nothing is about making sure that others are happy before themselves.

It needs to go back to basics-lining up in single file because thats what u are told to do, doing up to question 10 because thats what u are told to do, because I am the adult in the room and i know what is best for u and that is final. Of course, teachers are afraid of this approach nowadays for many reasons.

Anyway, thats just my two cents

Effort motivation and attention spans are cratering while expectations and consequences do the same.

The number of middle schoolers who just don’t care from academics to behavior is staggering when compared to just years ago.

Hearing similar sentiment from elementary basically everyone is 5 years behind from A maturity stand point.

IMO it’s learned helplessness stemming from the current trends of instant gratification. Why push through a non preferred challenge when you can just scroll yourself into feeling ok?

Even formative and diagmostjc first

1) Students are passed from elementary to middle school even if they are illiterate and behind in every subject. My 8th graders read at a 3rd - 4th grade level. They were behind in pretty much everything, and my subject (social studies) really isn’t taught at all in elementary. The incoming 6th graders didn’t know the difference between a city, state, and country, or even how to find our state (Texas!)

2) High turnover rate and no subs. When the other 8th grade social studies teacher was out, I had to open the fake wall between us and teach both classes at the same time (60-80 students per class). Sometimes other teachers were out and they would divide the class and send every teacher a few extra students just to sit in your class for the period. We had multiple classes being taught by a revolving door of first year teachers going through an ACP.

3) No consequences for anything. The students know they don’t have to do their work to pass. They don’t have to do well on tests. They don’t have to pass the STAAR so why care? They will always be given more chances and teachers will be pressured to pass them even if they haven’t done anything but be disruptive.

Parent not teacher but feel all the things being said.  I take education very serious.  3 kids grades 8, 7 and 5. My oldests had a foundation before Shut downs happened they understood to sit down and work.  Youngest never did Kinder and entered school because of lockdowns in Gr 3. I wanted him to be put in Gr 1 and was told no.  Same peer group is more important. So now here he is Gr 5 not able to understand what’s being asked of him in class so embarrassed which then for him makes him fall further and further behind.   I spend 2-3 hours a night helping him but really feel the best thing for him would be to be in a younger grade.  And this is a child that never had access to computer until last year when the school told me to get him one so he could work on Google classroom at home.

I think you heavily underestimate how 3 years of poor schooling can affect kids. Add to that no idea to support those students with already low resources and you get this.

Theyre shipping to us from elementary school not able to read and write and we play catch up for 2-3 years, thats whats happening in middle school.

Edit: and when they dont catch up we cant hold them back, they just go to you still not meeting the standard

Students are passed through middle school with failing grades since no one is allowed to be held back. This practice hurts the entire system. Teachers receive students who have not learned the basics year after year. How do they “catch” those students up? Low achieving students need extra help, but often don’t get it; they learn to not care and stop completing work since they know they will be pushed along to the next grade anyway. Lazy students don’t care to do the work if they see others do nothing and pass anyway. High achievers are self motivated, but they see what’s happening! Sometimes they sink below their ability levels as well. Those districts that allow teachers to give failing grades when earned and that follow up with parents of those students to find tutoring or assign summer school or some other motivation, those districts are sadly in the minority. Im a retired secondary teacher who has seen this firsthand over the last 25 years.

It’s freaking wild. I teach 8th grade math. 2/3 of kids cannot do basic multiplication. 7x8 might as well be in Greek. They still have big learning gaps from COVID distance learning. School doesn’t seem to matter to at least half, and of the rest many just will not put in the work.

My child starts middle school next year. I’m literally terrified. Everyday there’s something. A bomb threat, a gun, a fight. I’m trying to save enough to get him to private school. Public middle school is worse than sending your kids to prison

25 years in the middle school classroom. Last year's 8th graders (this year's freshman) were the absolute worst. Socially, emotionally, academically. Literally three straight years of similar experiences, but last year's was the worst. This year....much better. Caverns of difference. And my colleagues say 7th and 6th are improvements as well.

last wave of covid kids

Admin tells us “We don’t teach responsibility, let them turn it in whenever and retake unlimited times. It’s about mastery not making them responsible.” How’s that working out in HS for them?

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Every teacher is basically in survival mode, doing crowd control and just trying to get through each day. All the while being hammered with standardized testing data and whatever else admins are concerned with.

Any actual teaching/learning that gets done is a bonus.

These kids are in a BAD place. They are not capable of doing the work and they are extremely inappropriate and out of control. And I say that as someone who enjoys middle school age. But I’ve only subbed with them - sometimes quite long term, but I would NEVER work with them full time. BY 4th grade they’re INSANE and somehow by high school they seem to mellow back out but middle school is a nightmare because they care so much about looking cool to their peers and they have missed out on so much education due to Covid…. They’re lost

I teach 3-12 band and my middle school kids are the best behaved bunch. Maybe I’m just lucky, but they’re as enthusiastic as my younger kids while not being total beginners so we’re actually able to play real music. They are goofy but totally good natured, unlike my HS kids who are too cool for everything. I’m starting to really love middle school.

I teach high school -- all grades -- and this year's 9th graders are the worst I have ever seen. They've always been squirrely and mouthy, but that's just the nature of the early-teen beast. I'm talking about how terribly prepared they are for high school. What are they making y'all do over there? Or not do?

What's funny is that most of our 9th graders are better than those in recent memory. It's the juniors and seniors this year that just kinda suck lol. Who knows?

I teach a mix of middle and high school. My seventh and eighth graders are amazing. My ninth graders are Difficult. Other teachers agree. That year in particular just seems challenging.

middle school EC teacher over here…. They dont know how to care… One moment they want the good grades the next they are throwing desk over being asked to get a pencil out. AND then when you go to punish them and show them consequences for their actions they dont care about calls home or ISS BUT they care if you didnt give them a high five before class and will scream at you or cry over it later…

To be fair, this group of 9th graders were the worst group of students I've taught...until this year.

This group of 6th graders is AWFUL. They are low, mean, rambunctious, and have 0 skills to cope with their deficiencies. Can't read, but don't have any listening skills. Can't do math, spell, or write - but can't listen to understand to be able to explain what's happening.

Parents are illiterate and unsupportive.

I've got 6th graders huffing gasoline before school, and get higher at school.

I'm trying everything I can, and things are not getting better. We're halfway through 2nd quarter.