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SUMMIT, Ky. (AP) — Middle school teachers know better than most that their students are struggling with adolescence at the same time they are grappling with higher thinking and more stringent academic demands in class.
But even teachers can forget just how complex and tough is the three-year journey between the elementary grades and high school.
Lora Parsons wanted to reacquaint herself with the academic and social lives of middle-schoolers, so she decided to walk the halls in their shoes, sit in their plastic classroom chairs and lunch with them in the cafeteria.
Parsons, who teaches at Boyd County Middle School, spent all day Wednesday as a student. She spent time with all three grades — sixth, seventh and eighth. She took tests, solved math problems, read history and practiced the guitar. More important, she kept her eyes, ears, and mind open, watching and listening for insights into the minds of her young students.
Through observation and by recalling memories of her own youth, Parsons achieved a better understanding of what kids are thinking and talking about at school and what they need to enhance their education.
She started the day with reading, science and band, changing rooms with the rest of the herd between periods. Navigating the halls in her student role reminded Parsons that the space between two rows of lockers can be a gauntlet through which children pass under the judgmental eyes of their peers.
"To somebody coming in new, it could be overwhelming, making your way from place to place, especially if you don't know where you are going," she said. "There's a crowd. It definitely can feel like you're swimming upstream."
Getting from class to class on time was not difficult, but at least one transition involved rooms roughly at opposite ends of the building and Parsons found herself cutting it close.
By fourth period she had scurried to history class where she was sitting in the third row, the back of her chair squeezed up against the thin accordion-pleated curtain separating the room from the class next door.
That is where she discovered viscerally what she already knew as a teacher: that students often get distracted by forces beyond control.
The class was watching a video presentation on the Revolutionary War era Boston Massacre, but Parsons found it difficult to concentrate because of the noise from the class on the other side of the curtain.
It is a problem every teacher at the school is familiar with, and there is no apparent solution, at least until an anticipated renovation is completed in a couple of years. Sitting in the back row didn't provide her with a magic bullet remedy but it did enhance her understanding of students who struggle to concentrate in class.
History class was 50 straight minutes of sitting in a cramped desk/chair combination, squeezed between two other kids. By the time she got up to go to her next class her teacher's brain had kicked back in, telling her to manage her classes so that students don't always have to sit for extended periods.
Lunch was another exercise in brevity. Parsons hurried into the cafeteria, still smelling faintly of bleach after its morning cleaning, and settled into the back of a line of hungry students.
Assistant principal Tom Holbrook half-jokingly scolded her for neglecting to leave her purse and books in her locker.
She had less than half an hour to get her meal and eat it, and then hurry to the next class.
Seventh-grader Rylee Miller had some advice for Parsons:?"When you're in this jungle, you get rushed. So hurry to eat, but don't get choked," she counseled.
Wednesday was turkey day so Parsons loaded her yellow plastic segmented tray with a couple of slices, a square of dressing, a hemispherical lump of mashed potatoes and gravy in a styrofoam dish, green beans, sweet potato, a roll and a brownie.
A group of students invited her to sit with them, possibly because for one day they were allowed to call her Lora.
Conversation may not have been as free and open as it might have been in her absence, but Parsons said later she enjoyed connecting with the children during the lunch period, even though she didn't have time to finish her turkey dinner.
Her tray disposed of, Parsons moved on to life skills class, what in earlier times would have been called home economics. Substitute Kathy Boyd handed out worksheets on which among other things students unscrambled names of fruits and vegetables.
It was mostly heads down, eyes on paper time, and Parsons fiddled with her green Papermate pen while puzzling out the location of "artichoke" in the word search.
"It was a long time to sit and do worksheets. Now I know what kind of work not to leave for a substitute," she said later.
Advanced math was next. Parsons knew going in that teacher Karmen Broaddus would lead an exciting class. "She's always on her toes, which keeps student on theirs. There's no zoning out. There's a lot going on in math class," she said.
She left math class with a key insight courtesy of Broaddus — ?"The more simply an idea is presented, the more deeply you store it," she recalled.
Other teachers would benefit from changing roles for a day, she said. "To be in their seat and feel it yourself is different from watching a video or reading about it in a book."
Principal Bill Boblett said he would encourage his other teachers to try the experiment. "After a while, we forget what students go through,"?he said.
Among the most powerful lessons of the day were insights into adolescent vulnerability, the things that feel trivial to adults but which dominate the youthful psyche. Parsons remembered an episode from her own childhood when her stomach rumbled because of mid-morning hunger pangs. "I?wanted to crawl under my desk. It's that insecurity, those nerves, feeling like you stick out like a sore thumb.
"I?hope I'll be more sensitive and have those things in the forefront of my mind from now on," she said.
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