I just stumbled upon this article (“For Teachers, Middle School Is Test of Wills”) published four years ago this month in the New York Times as part of a “Critical Years” series, which examined developments in middle school-specific pedagogy and “survival skills.” A few key passages jumped out to me:
Faced with increasingly well-documented slumps in learning at a critical age, educators in New York and across the nation are struggling to rethink middle school, particularly in cities, where the challenges of adolescent volatility, spiking violence and lagging academic performance are more acute.
As they do so, they are running up against a key problem: a teaching corps marked by high turnover, and often lacking expertise in both subject matter and the topography of the adolescent mind [...]