After 12 Years Jumping Between Grades, I Still Don’t Have a ‘Best’ Answer – But I Have My Preferences
People ask me this all the time, right? At cookouts, at district staff meetings when we’re waiting for the keynote to start, even my mom asks when I’m going to “settle down” with the “easiest” grade. I’ve done full-time stints in all three – four years elementary, three middle, five now in high school – so I guess I’m qualified to weigh in. But it’s never the clear-cut answer people want. I swear, half the time people ask just to argue with whatever I say, anyway.
Let’s start with the little kids. I taught 2nd and 3rd grade my first four years out of college, and I left with more sticky handprints on my jeans than actual legible lesson plan notes. People say elementary is just all hugs and cute drawings, and sure, that’s part of it. Last month I subbed a half day for a 2nd grade teacher on medical leave, and a girl with pigtails tied in neon rubber bands brought me a half-puffed dandelion she’d picked on the walk into school. She insisted I blow it and make a wish, and when I did, she clapped like I’d just pulled a rabbit out of a hat. But what people don’t talk about is the part where you spend 20 minutes before open house scraping chewed bubble gum off the bottom of 14 desks. Or the time a kindergartner I was covering for told a room full of parent volunteers that my breath smelled like “grown-up juice” (it was coffee, for the record) and I just stood there red-faced while everyone laughed. I once spent a whole recess walking a kid around the playground because he’d peed his pants and was too embarrassed to go to the nurse, and I didn’t mind that day, but some days I’d go home and just collapse on the couch because I’d used up all my patience redirecting kids from eating glue. The best part about elementary, though, is that they love you loud. They leave you misspelled sticky notes on your desk that say “u r my favrit teechr” and draw you lopsided hearts, and they don’t hide it. You don’t have to guess if they like you. That’s something you can’t get any other place.
Middle school gets such a bad rap, and I get it. I taught 7th grade ELA, and I still have flashbacks to the secondhand cringe. I once accidentally called an 8th grade girl “hon” when I handed back her quiz, and she cringed so hard her whole face scrunched up, and she didn’t speak to me for two weeks. They’re half kid half something unrecognizable, all awkward lanky limbs and unprompted oversharing and sudden dead silence. One minute they’re running around the classroom throwing erasers, the next minute they won’t make eye contact with you if you say good morning. I remember one kid who just blurted out in the middle of a Giver discussion that his mom was leaving his dad and no one was talking to him at home, and I had to stop the whole class and walk out with him, and I had no idea what to say. I just stood there while he cried and handed him a bunch of the cheap hand lotion I kept in my desk.
But for all that, middle school has this weird magic no one talks about. Their sense of humor is so sharp, so unfiltered, nothing like the little kids’ knock-knock jokes or the high schoolers’ self-deprecating memes that are too sad to really laugh at. They’ll draw you silly doodles of the Giver as a penguin in the margin of their tests, and they’ll slip you Sour Patch Kids when you’re having a bad day. I had a kid who told me he hated reading every single day for the first half of the year, then he picked up Percy Jackson from my classroom library and didn’t put it down. He brought me the finished book after he was done, asked me to sign it, like I’d done something huge. The hard part, though, is that the drama is endless. You’re constantly mediating fights over TikTok drama, figuring out who’s being left out at lunch, and one bad mood can spread through the whole class like wildfire. Some days I left middle school with a headache so bad I’d have to take a nap before I even thought about making dinner.
I’ve been teaching 10th and 11th grade ELA for five years now, and this is what I do most days. People say high school is easier because the kids can take care of themselves, and that’s true – I don’t have to wipe anyone’s glue off their hands or help anyone tie their shoes. But it’s a different kind of hard. Last semester, I kept catching a kid falling asleep in the back of my class every single day. I pulled him aside after school, ready to talk about missing homework and study habits, and he told me he works 30 hours a week at an auto shop after school and on weekends to help his mom pay their rent, so he only gets like four hours of sleep a night. I didn’t know what to say, so I just gave him the granola bar I had in my bag and told him he could sleep the last 10 minutes of class any day as long as he turned in his work.
The best part here is that you get to have actual, adult conversations. After we read The Great Gatsby last semester, we sat around talking about whether the American dream is even real for people like them, and a first-generation student whose parents run a corner deli downtown told me that the American dream is just something they sell you to make you work harder, and it stuck with me for weeks. They don’t love you loud, but when they text you a year after graduation to tell you they got into nursing school or that they finally read that book you recommended, that means more than any lopsided heart. The bad part is that they’re so stressed all the time, and you can only fix so much. You see them burning out over AP tests and college apps, and you can tell them to slow down but they can’t, because that’s the world they’re growing up in.
People always push for an answer, which grade is best? I tell them it depends. When I was 22, fresh out of college, I had enough energy to deal with glue eating and gum scraping and pee accidents, and I loved that uncomplicated loud love. Now that I’m 34, my back hurts more and I don’t have the energy to chase a kid around the playground for an hour after recess, so I like the slow, deep conversations with high schoolers. But last week, after I got that dandelion from the 2nd grader, I sat in my car in the parking lot and cried for five minutes, because I missed that easy sweetness. Yesterday I was sitting on my couch eating cold pizza, staring at a stack of 32 ungraded essays, and I thought, what if I just quit high school and go back to teaching fraction cookies with sprinkles? But then this morning, a girl I helped edit her college essay brought me a homemade chocolate chip cookie, and it was still warm, and I thought, yeah, this is fine. There’s no best. Just what fits you, right now.
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