About Those Changes

I spoke recently of changes in the air. I am waiting for globat to set up FrontPage extensions on my site so I can publish, and I have finalized, more or less, my plans for next year. I will be transferring to a high school, which will remained unnamed for the moment, until all is settled. I know for certain that I will not return to my current school, and have notified my principal. Separate post on why I am leaving at a future date. My current school has a number of good qualities and lots of good people struggling to do good things, but it just isn't the right fit for me.

So, barring some unforeseen calamity, I know where I will be next year, but I want to get everything completely settled before announcing any details. In the beginning, way back in grad school when I decided to become a teacher, I wanted to teach high school. I never wanted to teach middle school and just basically fell into the job, initially thinking it was a temporary situation to pay the bills. For technical reasons I was never able to make the leap - that technical reason being that I didn't have a secondary science license, which I now have. There were a number of years at my middle school where I thought that middle school was great, and in many ways it should be great - middle school students can be incredibly enthusiastic and fairly easily wowed with science. But getting past the "wow" and into the "how" is often a struggle, and the older I get, it seems, the more difficult it is to deal with some of the nonsense 11-13 year olds can put you through, especially in an large, overcrowded, often overwhelmed school.

I'm excited and a little nervous about the transition. I may well be in for a let down in thinking that high school will be different, but my own experience and what I hear from colleagues is that for the most part the sturm & drang of middle school does indeed diminish in early high school. Either way, the main attraction for me is that I will be able to concentrate on teaching biology, and if the difference between 8th & 9th grade is subtle rather than radical, then I'm certainly prepared to deal with that - 8th graders are actually pretty cool anyway.