A Room Full of Middle School People

I’m awkward. They’re awkward. It just fits.

That’s what I tell people when they ask why I teach middle school, and I truly mean it completely every time. I knew going into Winthrop University that I wanted a middle-level program specifically. Not something I would adjust or adapt. The real thing. The weird, unpredictable, you-love-me-one-day-and-hate-me-the-next thing that is seventh grade. Sixth grade feels like a slow roller coaster building all year, and eighth grade begins chaotic but settles down. Seventh grade is just constant chaos, and I love it. I love watching students discover who they are in real time, that moment when they still need you, but you can already see who they’re becoming.

About my junior year, one of my professors mentioned a conference. There is a middle-level conference, she said. You can apply for a grant. They will pay for it. You just have to find somewhere to stay.

I was like, okay, that sounds neat.

When I walked in, I found a room full of people who truly love middle schoolers. Not just those who tolerate them or ended up here because elementary jobs were full. These were people who chose this on purpose and were genuinely excited. At other conferences, even good ones, there’s usually a shift toward elementary or high school. You have to spend energy adjusting and translating. But here, for the first time, I didn’t have to do any of that. Every session was already focused on my kids.

I went again before I graduated. I have gone every year I have been teaching. This year was my eighth time. And it has meant a lot to me.

During my senior year, my last internship didn’t go well. I saw teachers being negative about their students, and I started to wonder: if this is what teaching is, I don’t want it. I had spent four years in a program I loved and had chosen middle school on purpose. Yet there I was, standing in a building, doubting if I could really do this.

I went to the middle-level conference that year.

Okay, it’s not all teachers. It’s just this one group. Most middle school teachers aren’t like that. There are plenty of people who love what they do, love their kids, and want to get better for them.

I came back, finished, and have been in a classroom every year since. But it happened again. Two years ago was a really hard year. I had been feeling low since November, and by February, I was not sure I would make it to the end of the school year. I got to March. I got to the conference.

Okay. I can make it to the end of the year.

I tell my students every spring, “I am going to a conference this weekend.” I am coming back on Monday, and I will be so excited that it will feel like the first day of school. They look at me like I have lost my mind. I have a little bit. That is the point. It is perfectly timed, every year, right when I need it.

This year, I presented for the first time.

Eight years of attending. Never presented. My colleagues and I have been using a creative bookmaking strategy in our classrooms this year, and we decided to share it at the conference. I will not pretend I was not nervous. But then someone came up after and said, “This is my plan, this is exactly how I am going to use this.” And I later saw that people had used the templates I shared. Something I had made in my classroom had moved into other classrooms in other schools.

Not only am I a professional. I am starting to become a leader. Not just in my school. In other places where I can share knowledge and help people.

What made it better than I expected was that two of the teachers who taught me in middle school happened to come to my presentation. These are people who remember me from back then, and I genuinely feel bad about that. But standing there and watching them say, ” Look at how much you have grown, look at where you are going and where you are going to continue to go, that landed differently than I anticipated.

That same year, a teammate encouraged me to take on a leadership role at my school. He said: You go to the conference every year, you share everything you learn, you present to colleagues. You are already doing leadership. Why not make it official? I became a seventh-grade team lead this year. And at the conference, without planning, most of the sessions I attended were about leadership development as if the whole thing knew where I was and what I needed next.

I have applied for the grant almost every year I have attended. The application asks one thing: how are you going to share what you learn? And I would share anyway. I always do. The grant just gives the sharing a shape and a deadline, which makes it easier to follow through. I presented to my department the day after I got back this year. People were already asking me: ” How was it? What did you learn? What are you going to do?

If someone asked me to describe the conference in one word, I would say resource. A resource for knowledge. A resource for connection. A resource for the moment in the year when your bucket is running low, and you need someone to remind you why you are here.

Middle school is a more important time in a young person’s development than most people realize. A middle schooler’s brain develops at a rate comparable to that of a newborn’s. And yet it is the level that gets the least targeted support, the least specifically designed professional development, the most eye rolls in the break room. Having a place to go where none of that is present, where the whole room is filled with people who chose this and are glad they did, matters more than I can fully explain.

Next year is year fifty. I cannot wait to see what they do with it.