Middle school students are like rodents

Sometimes things truly aren't at all what they seem. Two nights ago, I felt something scampering over my legs as I slept. Only half awake, my legs kicked out involuntarily, and I heard something hit the closet door. My sleep-deprived mind struggled to make sense of what had just happened. The mysterious creature had felt too heavy to be a mouse, but the thought of a rat in our tiny one-bedroom apartment filled me with such a sense of dread that I didn't even want to contemplate it.

The next day, my wife picked up some mouse traps on her way home, but as I started to bait them, my trusty Border Collie began to act more like a Blood Hound. With his nose to the carpet, he circled the television and followed the invisible aromatic trail all the way to the coat closet. He nudged open the door and went inside. With a slight rustling of the contents of the closet, Fuzz managed to herd the rodent into the corner. Fearing my dog would end up with rabies from a vicious rat bite, I rushed to the closet and slipped on some old gloves. But as I knelt to try to capture what I fully expected to be a mangy, plague-infected rat, I found myself staring into the cute little face of a hamster, which looked up at me with its whiskers twitching. I've never owned a hamster, and I have no idea how the little boogar managed to get into our apartment. Instead of disposing of a nasty rat, we found ourselves adopting someone's wayward pet hamster.

I secured him in an over-sized Tupperware container and dropped in a piece of a hotdog bun. While the hamster stuffed a nearly hamster-sized bun into his jaws, I thought of how things aren't often at all as they seem even in middle school, and my mind drifted to my Practicum.

In my Practicum, I'm finding that middle school students are just as surprising as my little night-time adventure. I recently graded some tests for my teacher, and I often found myself totally surprised by the results. One boy, who often lays on the floor or sits on the window ledge while completing an assignment, aced the test. I guess I'd thought he was ADHD or something, and I expected him to struggle. Another boy, whose answers to the teacher's questions during lectures were brilliant, struggled on the test. As it turns out, this boy has trouble reading (dyslexia), but through shear determination, he is maintaining decent grades. One girl almost always falls asleep during class, and in fact fell asleep during the first portion of the test, yet her test wasn't nearly as bad as I'd thought it would be. Many of the test results were truly a pleasant surprise to me. There were a few kids, who didn't even try, but for the most part—the results were good. Being pleasantly surprised felt so good, that started thinking that perhaps many of the students would like to be pleasantly surprised by the lessons.

Last year, I heard of a social studies teacher who lamented the fact that his class could never quite make it to the end of his textbook. No matter how hard he tried, with the usual chronological order that he usual went through the book, he never could reach the modern era. For a while, it would seem like he'd almost make it if he rushed, but then would come the usual standardized tests—and he'd be stymied. So he spoke with his administrators and was able to get permission to test the book backwards—starting with the modern era.

The kids totally excelled! Perhaps it was the fact his class wasn't what they expected, or perhaps it was such a pleasant surprise that the kids paid more attention. Either way, the students were able to relate to the subject of history better since they first studied modern leaders before delving into the dusty old powdered wigs of our ancestors. In this way, they were able to relate to the origins of government, having studied how it works currently.

I've begun to think of how I might make my lessons a bit more surprising without diminishing their relevance in any way. I think if we think out of the box, perhaps they will learn to do it, and thinking outside the box might just be as good of a lesson as studying some of the more usual lessons.

Okay, maybe middle schoolers are really all that much like rodents, but being pleasantly surprised rocks—whether its with test results, history teachers who teach backwards, or finding a hamster in your closet instead of a rat.