Challenging Changes...

We are well into the school year and the rumor mills are turning faster than windmill in Western KS.  (a joke most students won't get :) )  I knew that this would be part of the job when I moved to the middle school population, but what I didn't count on was how constant and complicated the problems would get.  Tangled webs is an understatement compared to what some of the middle school students are able to create here.  If these students spent half of the energy on their classwork as they do on these rumors and deceitful comments, we would have a school full of scholars. 
The teasing and the rude comments are hard enough when you are in middle school, and they lead to attendance problems all across the country.  However, the deceitful comments and straight out lies about the other students are the problems that are causing the greatest difficulty for many of the students.  There are students having to choose sides and pick between friends when the story doesn't have any truth to it in the first place.  Does anyone else remember playing the telephone game when they were in elementary school or at sleep overs?  You remember the game, where you sit in a circle and someone says something crazy, but they can only say it one time.  The next person has to repeat the sentence as they heard it, and so it goes.  Those are the politics of middle school.
Re-reading over the last several blogs, it is a wonder that any of us survived middle school at all.  But times are different now.  Social media is making middle school a different game altogether.  The best analogy I can come up with is that when we were kids we shopped with cash, and now our kids are shopping with debit cards.
Not that what we did was wrong, or what our kids are doing is wrong either.  It is just different.  A saying from my old school was "What we know today, doesn't make yesterday wrong, it makes tomorrow better".



With that information in hand, parents we have to start arming ourselves with the same information that our kids have.  We need to educate ourselves on the social media forms that you are kids are using.  We need to know how to use their forms of technology so that we can monitor and supervise them with an educated mind.
Parents, we can not control every aspect of our student's lives (trust me I have tried, and they are very resistant to that process).  However, we can continue to have informed conversations with our students.  I am not talking about the hard conversations about sex, drugs, and violence.  I am talking about everyday conversations about how their friends are doing, where they are going, and how they are spending their time on their devices.  Have your student teach you the latest and greatest new social media craze.  What a great way to empower a child, learn a new skill, and develop your relationship.  Who said middle school had to be all bad?