When I went through teacher training, it was at the elementary level (grades K-6), and learning centers were simply something we did. Most of the time, the stations were created so students could cycle through three to four learning activities over the course of a few days. Often times, the teacher was stationed with a reading group, providing some much needed one-on-one time. But at the middle school level, it is slightly more challenging because more is required of the students. In elementary classes, the most coveted station was usually some kind of game (anyone remember queueing for Oregon Trail only to have the wagon tip over and everyone drowned?). Now, games are old hat.

Students used task cards to locate prepositional phrases. The sentences based on Riverdale and The Flash were huge hits!

Several years ago, prior to our students having a one-to-one set up with computers, I had stations for six days that rotated in the middle of a writing unit. Two of the days involved revision – one with peers and one with me –  while the other four centered on grammar and vocabulary. So much planning went into a rotation such as this. I had colored folders and papers and magnets and baskets, but it worked for the most part. For some reason, I stopped running centers after a couple of years because they took so much time to organize, and using them again required being at the same place each year if I wanted to reuse them. Never happened – I’ve never been in the same place in our curriculum at the same time of the year, so reusing the centers was basically a non-starter.

But this time, I opted to take out the revision and conferencing and instead have the students focus entirely on one specific skill or unit. The stations that I created all had to do with prepositional phrases and gave the students more practice to identify and use the phrases correctly in context. It was a lot harder than I thought to come up with five distinct tasks for my students to create, but I wanted to make sure that they could complete them collaboratively and that they involved a fair amount of writing. If all they were doing was simple identification, then a worksheet would accomplish the same task. The five tasks that I included were: descriptive paragraph using prepositional phrases; analyze a passage from a novel and create new prepositional phrases; generate a list of prepositional phrases to describe a Google Doodle; figure out the prepositional phrase based on context only; and simple prepositional phrase identification using task cards. Even though my directions were crystal clear, I found that I needed to visit each group – beginning with the Google Doodle station – to make sure that everyone understood the directions. In the end, I truly felt as if I were running to stand still because I never seemed to make it any further than where I was.

One of the stations was to describe this photo and determine where it was taken using a clue in the caption

There are a lot of pros and cons for stations (or centers) in a middle school setting:

Pros

• movement in the classroom
• collaboration with peers
• differentiation of materials
• not just a worksheet
• multiple attempts at success
• many more opportunities to use the chosen concept in writing

Cons

• lots of talking, which can get out of hand
• possibility for one person to take over the group
• need for incredibly clear directions and the need to read them (not really a con but so many of my kiddos said they didn’t understand what they needed to do and yet did not read the directions)
• So. Much. Time – this took at least two full class days

In the end, was I glad that I used stations to teach prepositional phrases? Yes. Would I do this again? Probably, but with some modifications. Creating the stations took a lot of work because I laminated all of the task cards and papers so they could be used again next year. While I liked my students getting the opportunity to work with their peers, I know that there was the chance that several people would rely on their group members to get their answers, and this practice would not be of real benefit for them. If I did this again, I would probably restructure it so that we didn’t spend as much time on the stations.

*If you haven’t figured it out by now, I really love song lyrics. Like a lot a lot love song lyrics. I would happily debate why certain song lyrics are more resonant or why the final 43 seconds of U2’s “Gloria” might be the most perfect 43 seconds ever (watch the whole thing or skip ahead to 3:00, but trust me on this one). The title for this post is from another U2 song, and when I decided to give stations a whirl, I started humming it nonstop for a few days.

The start of the school year means listening to a whole laundry list of rules and dispensing with an even longer list of rules. You need to do XYZ before you copy anything. Take out the next four things for a fire drill. Be sure you check your mailbox twice a day, every day. Rules . . . I get it. We need them, but we don’t always enjoy hearing them or, to be honest, giving them.

Our kids look at us with glazed eyes after they’ve heard the same rule for the cafeteria that they, in all likelihood, have heard since kindergarten. Come in. Wash your hands. Head to your table. Wait for the monitors to call on you to go get your lunch. Eat your food. Wait until you are told to throw away your trash. When you hear your table called for dismissal, head out the back door. All too often, the rules start to sound daunting and overbearing when in reality they are simply common sense: treat the cafeteria like a restaurant where you enjoy eating, and everything will work out fine. One of my coworkers put it to the kids the best: rules are there to make things run smoothly for the other 1,000 people in the building.

And yet, teachers hear all too often that we are being too harsh, that schools are more like prisons these days. Trust me, they aren’t. But the rules sometimes seem oppressive, especially if you are coming off of three months of some carefree living. Remember – the rules are there to make things run smoothly for the other 1,000 people in the building. Honestly, I would say that just about all of the students on our team follow the rules because they have common sense, which might seem a little odd for seventh graders. Sure, we have our days when it is more difficult to walk that straight and narrow path (I’m looking at you, Full Moon!), but everything being equal, students follow the rules. The ones that they seem to have difficulty with are the more nebulous ones like dress code. Even that, I completely get it! Leggings are more comfortable than dress pants, but if you can’t wear them, you can’t wear them. Sorry. It’s truly nothing personal . . . it’s just a simple rule.

This year, I’m trying out 20% Time with my students. Maybe you’ve heard about it? It started when Google gave its employees 20% of their time to work on projects that interested them personally. Thanks to 20% Time, you have Gmail! Do I think my kids will create the next Gmail? Possibly, but I doubt it. Do I think that they will find a problem and try to find a workable solution? Oh, absolutely! After all, there have got to be some rules out there that they think need changing. Wish us luck!

“Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod! Mrs. Greenwood – I’m going to make $15 and hour at this job. That’s good money, right?”

A few years back – probably more than a few years, truth be told – our district started incorporating career exploration into the curriculum, and for some reason, it was shunted to the English teachers because, you know, writing. “You can research careers! Have the kids create an essay!” enthused just about anyone who would talk about it. Reading an essay about being a marine biologist is challenging on the best days. Now expand that by ten kids, and you get the idea. The essays themselves became repetitive quickly, and quite frankly, I found them very unforgiving from a student’s point of view. What started off as giving the students a chance to explore careers had turned into yet another process essay, and all parties were frustrated. Three years ago, things started to change.

My kiddos had no concept of taxes or expenses or anything that comes with “adulting,” so we shifted our focus away from reading about careers and their job duties (hilarious word for middle schoolers, btw) to the nuts and bolts of the job: would you make a living wage and could you be happy doing it? The evolution of this has taken many twists and turns – and it’s always a work in progress – but I’m happy with where we’re headed.

Basically, I used to walk around the room with my phone and do some quick calculations on the calculator. First of all, they had no concept of what an hourly wage meant in the big picture, so we would chat about how many hours they wanted to work. It usually ranged between 25 and 35, but they would often listen to reason and went with 40. Next, taxes – no one had heard about taxes, or at least they feigned ignorance. That was the easy part. Subtracting out all the “luxuries” like housing and food and utilities became cumbersome after the first three or four kids, so I decided to streamline things and created a spreadsheet that they could edit and make decisions about based on their chosen careers.

“You get to pick . . . you know, put your hand in here and pick.”

When we first started this, I allowed the kids to choose their own careers, but since everyone wanted to be either a video game developer, professional athlete, or singer, I stopped and told them they were going to pick. Semantics is everything in the middle school setting, and picking meant putting your hand into the lovely container and picking a piece of paper. Part of this is to maintain some level of sanity, but I really wanted them to be exposed to a variety of careers. Never heard of a resource management specialist? Awesome . . . go do some exploration!

The spreadsheets now come based on the level of degree that you would need: none, two-year or specialty school, four-year bachelor’s degree, or advanced professional. Within that range, I have formulated the spreadsheets to take out percentages for taxes, housing, health insurance, savings, utilities, car payments (including insurance and gas), and student loans. The only thing I leave optional is the food budget. The students choose what they want for food. Some quickly realize that they might be on the Raman noodle every night budget, and some decide that eating out once or twice a week might be in their cards. Usually, I have three or four kids per class that are in the red before they even get to their food budget, and when that happens, I tell them they can come to my house for a spaghetti dinner once a week. If in seven or eight years, young adults start turning up on my doorstep looking for some of my “fantastic” sauce (hint: it’s store bought), I’ll know that they were at least paying attention a little bit.

This year, I experimented with a Fast Forward, by introducing down payments for homes and saving for vacations. In previous years, we never factored in the money that you would need to furnish a home, what to budget for clothing, or how much money a pet would cost, so that was also included this year. All in all, I would love to develop this further by coming up with ways for students to assess what happens when life throws you a curve ball or two, but I’m still trying to figure it all out. We normally create infographics about the career and what you can expect, but I opted to spend more time on the financial side of their jobs. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to continue heading down this path since I think my kids get more out of it.

Suggestions going forward? I’d love to hear if you have tried something like this in the past with your classes.

Next year, I’m planning on having my students blog more. In the past, we’ve used Edmodo with limited results in this area because it is more closed than a traditional blog, so I would like to give them more ability to share their writing. I’ve thought about doing this for the past few years – last post? three years ago – but for curricular reasons, I’ve just never been able to do it. I think that I have a good grasp of what I would like the students to accomplish, but I’m concerned about the following:

• motivation: how to keep the students motivated
• commenting: I need to figure out a way to get beyond the “I like it!” comments
• authentic writing: how to focus on the writing being authentic and not formulaic
• images: inclusion of images or not
• the unknown: it frightens me terribly.

If anyone has any suggestions or has had any success with blogging, please leave me a comment and let me know. I think that I’ll have about 125 students next year, so it is a large group of kids.