6 Tips for Teaching Middle School

An idiosyncratic fact about life in secondary school is that students and teachers often have widely different experiences of the same environments and events.

It may be surprising to realize, but vastly differing perspectives, home-lives and responsibilities, not to mention age, affect how secondary teachers and their students perceive and react to the same situations, usually quite differently.

So if you’re considering the profession, it’s important to consider what life as a secondary teacher is really like. It’s one thing to sit in a classroom as a student and make assumptions about the job, but it’s quite another to enter into the working world of secondary teaching and discover what really works and what doesn’t.

6 Middle School Teaching Tips

1. Teaching Is Hard Work

The first middle school teaching tip is obvious: Teachers can’t be lazy. Correcting work and grading papers and tests takes a lot of time, not to mention the lesson planning and preparation involved.

2. Paperwork and Corrections

All teachers are administrators-even the ones with papers strewn all over their desks-not just those in leadership roles.

3. Teaching Requires Dedication

Resourceful teachers try very hard to integrate their creative ideas with specific mandated curricula.

4. Teacher Education

Secondary teachers are smarter than students think. With over 50 percent of teachers now holding master’s degrees, staying competitive in the field requires sacrifice and dedication.

5. A Teacher’s Powers of Perception

High school and middle school teachers really do have eyes on the back of their heads. Secondary teachers are trained to be perceptive in noticing and assessing students with physical, mental and learning disabilities, as well as reporting suspicious activities on or around campus.

6. Teachers and Technology

Many teachers today are computer junkies just like their students. High school and even middle school teaching now utilizes computers throughout the curriculum. Middle school teaching tip #6: Competitive teachers need to master common programs and Internet protocol to teach and report grades effectively.

If you don’t mind the hard work, paper work, dedication, education, perception and invention, you might have what it takes to become an A+ teacher.

Who knows? Maybe you’ll become that teacher everyone remembers fondly once they graduate into the wide open world.