Yes, Middle Schoolers Are Hard To Teach, and Nobody Is Really Lazy

Stop me if you've heard this one-- primary grade students love to learn, and middle school students do not.

I could hear my joints crusting over while reading a new piece about disengaged teens in The Atlantic, by a pair of writers who are apparently experts. This is, I guess, one of those features of age-- young folks earnestly explaining to you things that you thought conscious human beings already knew.

"The Teen Disengagement Crisis" is by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, a journalist-educator team that have written a whole book about this (which I have not read yet). 

Some of their observations are not news to anyone who has taught, ever. "By middle school, many kids’ interest in learning falls off a cliff." Well, yeah. When you are a little, the world is exciting, learning stuff is as easy as breathing, and you are both receiving and exuding glorious, unconditional love (as long as you don't have lousy parents, and sometimes even then, depending on what other people are in your world). You are crackling with energy. 

Then you turn 11 or 12 or 13 and it all turns to hell. Your body turns on you, growing into some gangly thing you can't quite control, as well as producing all sorts of foreign effects that can be alarming. You are suddenly at the mercy of hormone-induced emotions that you can't manage. You are simultaneously and painfully aware that 1) your life is largely leashed and restrained by a bunch of outside powers that you can't overcome and 2) that having the freedom to operate without those chafing restraints is absolutely terrifying. 

You used to do stuff and sometimes you'd win and sometimes you'd fail and it's not that you didn't have feelings about it, but now you have FEELINGS!!!! about it. 

And learning is hard. Somehow the machine in your head that just automatically picked stuff up is now broken. Well, at least it seems that way to you but that kid in the next desk in math seems to pick stuff up just fine and ace every test without even trying and who the hell does he think he is and why are you struggling so much oh my god is there something wrong with you and why didn't Pat say hi at lockers this morning and what's for lunch today shit is there a zit on my nose now??!! What was the assignment again?

Anderson and Winthrop write about "Passenger Mode" which I think is a good way to describe the mode some students settle into. They aren't super engaged, and they aren't totally checked out. Sometimes folks stick passenger mode students with the L word-- lazy-- and the writers are on point here as well. Anderson and Winthrop point at painfully unengaging school work as a big part of the problem, but I think it's both more complicated and simpler than that. 

I taught 39 years, and I never met a lazy student in my entire life. What I met were students who were making choices about their own agency.

I could learn to speak conversational Chinese or work with Linux. But I've made a cost-benefits analysis and determined that the usefulness I'd get from the learning compared to the time and effort I'd have to put in means I'm just going to say, "No, thank you." Nobody calls me lazy or, worse yet, learning disabled because I make that choice. Adults make choices like that all the time. So do students.

I've shared that thought with my students. Particularly in the second half of my career, I was very explicit about respecting their right to make that decision, even if there are consequences ("I respect your right to skip all the assignments, that will still work out to a failing grade.")

Students can conduct the cost-benefits analysis, but they're not always good at it. They may not be great at assessing the benefits (my informal assessment is that roughly 98% of teens think learning history has no benefits). They may also be bad at estimating the costs, particularly if they have been ill-used by the system and beaten into a low estimate of their own skills. As the writers point out, treating students as if they are incompetent and have to be nagged into compliance does not help. It just increases their estimate of what compliance is going to cost (a chunk of their self-esteem). 

So the teacher's role is to help students with that cost-benefits analysis. Part of the job is to sell the material; what do they get out of complying with the lesson? In an earlier age, this was where the teacher was encouraged to "make the lesson relevant," which is truly terrible advice. If the lesson is relevant, explain why. If it isn't, don't teach it. And if you have to make it appear to be relevant, that's an admission that it isn't, so see the above. Benefits include practical items (communication skills are job skills) and broader items (I told my students for years, "The more education you have, the more jokes you get"). 

The cost side is where teachers have some control. The cost of the learning can be endless tedious drill or not. Teacher-as-coach work is about convincing students, one way or another, that this won't take all that much out of them. We've always known that little success points along the way boost confidence; ime, the main cost barrier for students tends to be that the task just seems too huge. 

Cost is also where the system figures in-- if it has been set up to convince students that Passenger Mode is the low-cost way to get through school, they will gravitate toward that mode. Again--this is not because they are lazy. It's a basic human approach-- would you be more likely to buy a pizza for $5 or essentially the same pizza for $150?

The cost side in school is also a two-part computation-- what is the cost of doing this compared to the cost of not doing this? This is where we get the adult approach of trying to jack up the price of non-compliance. I'm not going to say this is never productive ever, but I will say it's pretty close to never ever. For one thing, you're creating a lose-lose for the student, with two unpleasantly high-cost choices. For another, you are conditioning the student to run away from things rather than towards them, to practice building their life around avoiding unpleasant things rather than moving towards good stuff. And the worst part of both-- a teen will tend to blame anything sucky in their lives on themselves. 

I have ordered the book on the strength of this article, though I fear that the authors are far too ready to throw schools under the bus. But the board of directors are approaching these years, and it's been a couple of decades since the last time I was the parent of teens, and it won't cost this old fart much to read what these two have to say. I'll get back to you later.