Stuck in the Middle With You

Yes I’m stuck in the middle with you,

And I’m wondering what it is I should do,

It’s so hard to keep this smile from my face,

Losing control, yeah, I’m all over the place,

Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right,

Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

“Stuck in the Middle With You”
Song by Stealers Wheel

Writer’s Workshop in the Middle School

The year started, I was gungho, ready to go with the research and information I had gathered. Then it happened. Stopped-cold turkey. I am not sure which direction I want to take with my middle school writing workshop. Whenever I feel like I am going to start the workshop, and it’s in my plans every week; but why for some reason, I don’t follow through. Why? Because the group I need to work with is a really tough group. Why? Maybe because I feel writers workshop is too babyish or too elementary for my eighth graders. Why? I have been thinking I need to switch my focus group to my 6th or 7th graders, but I still really feel my eighth grade group is the perfect size and levels to focus on. Why? Because I am procrastinating and I feel very lost in the process. What can be so hard about getting a group of students together and working on writing with them, right? I realize there has to be quite a bit of preparation and determination to move forward. But this hasn’t happened yet. Yes, the gist of this is, that I haven’t started yet. So what is the problem? I think it is because I am so stuck in the way I teach that I am really struggling with change.

“Everything” I have read about middle school writing workshop is how perfect it will be because they are at such a great age to be experimenting with their writing. I do agree it’s a great age to experiment with writing if they write. When I look at the reality of my classroom, I’m like “Nope, it doesn’t seem to be happening.” Yes, they are hungry; yes, they want to examine their world, but do they want to do it by writing? Probably not, they would rather talk about it. How do I marry that combination?

Here’s the crutch…how do I organize it, so it looks middle schoolish and not elementaryish? The eighth graders I have are almost high schoolers and I want to treat them as such. I think what the deal is I don’t think I really know how to deal with this age yet. So everything I had planned hasn’t come to light. I think what I need to focus on is how can I structure a writing workshop for middle schoolers instead of an elementary class. All the plans I had at the beginning of the year has not panned out the way I wanted it to. The research has not been what I thought it was going to be.

So the next step is to create an atmosphere the eighth graders will respond to. The reading I have done in Nancie Atwell’s book In the Middle, A Lifetime of Learning About Writing, Reading, and Adolescents, brings me to the point I am at right now. That what I thought about writing workshop is so much different than what Atwell’s book and philosophy is. I wasn’t quite ready to embrace that. Why didn’t I know this?