From binders to notebooks, what helps us stay with it.
Keep it simple. Focus your help on a specific goal or task.
“I think that teachers should help you with the problem. If you get a C in English, then they should help you with what you need help on. That’s how the teachers can actually help you.” —Jessica
“Sometimes they give us an example of a small problem and then they skip through to a bigger problem. I think they should just take it step by step, until we understand that, and then get harder and harder problems.” —Genesis
Support us in mastering the new vocabulary of our subjects.
“For me, life science is my hardest subject, because science has all those big difficult words and our teachers make you memorize the definitions—like osmosis, and different parts of the cells, the nucleus, and the ‘nucleo-lus.’ It’s hard to get all those long definitions for those big words in my brain—those two words look exactly the same, and sometimes I forget. They give you a test the following week. She should cut down on the words. Instead of giving us ten words, she could make it half that.” —Denue
“My English teacher, she’s giving us good tips. She’s said, ‘This one will be on the test.’ She gave us a definition for it, and when I saw that on the test I automatically knew what it was.” —Kenson
Use different strategies to help us learn.
“Try to show kids their own way of learning. Like my way of learning, I have to see or touch things to learn. Some people have to hear things.” —Amanda N.
“Teachers should make a phrase sometimes for us to learn things. Like in math here, ‘Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally,’ P-E-M-D-A-S, it’s supposed to be about order of operations. That helps you learn—like when you come back to [a problem] you can think in your head, ‘What does P stand for?’” —Gabe
Help us get organized, and tell us why it matters.
“If I don’t keep my stuff organized, my teacher makes me miss ten minutes of recess, and we only have twenty minutes of recess, so that really stinks. If you’re not organized, it’s no fun and you can’t find anything when you need it. So now I have a really thick binder with different sections. I can keep all my work in it and when I need it, I just open up to that section. Once a week [it helps to have] a binder check. You get a check minus or a check plus, depending on what condition your binder is in.” —Daquan
“It is helpful if they give you more advice on how to get organized better. I was very disorganized. As soon as my adviser did binder-check on me, all my papers fell out, and I tried to stuff them back in. He had a talk with my mom about this. He took away my recess, so we could go over organization and it really helped.”—Javier
“Every Friday, my teacher would give us back work that we had done, and we wouldn’t really need it. We already knew what our grade was, and we would ask her if we could just recycle it or bring it home. “No, you have to keep it.” Then it’s just more and more papers in your backpack and your binder and you don’t know what to do with it. Why are we keeping our stuff organized?” —Genesis
Coordinate homework assignments and tests with other teachers.
“I’m bringing it straight out, they shouldn’t give that much homework. ’Cause we have so many classes and they give so much homework. Sometimes we focus on one class and not so much on another, and we have a pop quiz [on things] we won’t know, and we’ll get bad grades. We have so much homework to do, we have no time to go places or do things we have to do at home. Personal stuff, or maybe sometimes you want time to go outside or whatever.” —Eric F.
“We have seven classes a day, and they give three or four pieces of homework, sometimes front and back. That’s a lot of homework to be doing. When we get to [the after-school program], it’s like 3:15, so we only have till 4:30. It’s not enough time for us to do all seven classes’ homework.” —Katelin
Help us help each other to get our homework done.
“My mom and I were talking about a buddy system, so if you didn’t want to do your homework, you would be paired up with someone. Someone would call you every night and tell you, ‘Don’t forget to do this project,’ or ‘Did you do your homework?’ If you say no, ‘Well, then, why not?’ My friend and I, we check on each other sometimes. If we have a problem we can’t figure out, we try and figure it out together, or if I need something, I call her.” —Itai
Give us time in school to do homework and get help on it.
“You have to give the kids time to study. Some of my teachers, they just tell you Monday [that] there’s a test on Wednesday. You have to go over the stuff so the kids will know what to do. I stressed out, I guess you could say. I had to study all night and I was really nervous.” —Edward
“I don’t like American history that much, and I have to do this project and I don’t understand how, except the bibliography. If you want to get help, you go to the homeroom teacher, ’cause they know your whole schedule and they see your homework in the morning. It’s not hard for me to ask for help, but it’s hard for me to get it done when I also have other homework and things to do. I wait till the last three days, ’cause projects are due two weeks apart. The homeroom teacher was talking to my friend, saying that ‘You should do reports over the weekend—do one project one weekend, and skip the next weekend [while you do another one].’ But I would rather do the same project until it’s done, and then do the other project right after.” —Jason
Use your calls home to support us.
“I would really, really like it if my teacher would sometimes call home for a good thing that I do. My dad never seems to realize any good thing that I do, it’s like he’s blind. He pressures me on the bad things that I do. It’s like he takes a list and he counts up all the bad things. So if my teacher, instead of calling home whenever I do a bad thing, she would sometimes call home when I do a good thing, and let my dad know that I actually try hard, then I would do better.” —Amelia
“Maybe the teacher could call home to say, ‘Oh, your son or daughter seems to be distracted or disturbed by something,’ to find out what’s happening. If the parents are acting ignorant and rude, you figure maybe that the student is having a hard time at home.” —Kenson
Ask for our feedback.
“There’s not an ideal, perfect teacher. So teachers should maybe take a survey, like a quarter of the way through the semester. ‘How’s my class going? Is homework taking too long? Are you getting stressed out? Should I explain things more clearly? How can I make you a better student, or how can I help you learn better, or how can I help your attitude?’ Just so students can tell them what to improve on and what was good.” —Gabe
Excerpted from Fires in the Middle School Bathroom: Advice for Teachers from Middle Schoolers (New Press, 2008), by Kathleen Cushman and Laura Rogers, Ed.D., with the students of What Kids Can Do.
