Jeremy Bodenhamer
1.1K posts

Jeremy Bodenhamer
@FounderDad
The research tells you what's happening to boys. Fiction tells you what it's like to be one. Essays + poems + fiction → https://t.co/gIgeiMwxHY







I don't believe kids were meant to spend 8 hours a day sitting in a classroom learning about random things they'll never use in their lifetime.




Elementary school damages some kids. Middle school damages most of them. Little kids are still hopeful and optimistic. But middle school? Brutality, vulgarity, exposure to sex and drugs, bullying. Your sweet, innocent child you raised carefully, put in an environment with the worst elements you can imagine. And you don't know about it. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it: parents pay the schoolmaster to teach their child, but it's the schoolboys who actually educate him. Peer pressure is massive. What your kid won't tell you about is what everyone else is doing. If you could listen in, you wouldn't want your child exposed to half of it.












Middle school is where kids get lost. The research is clear. One adult who actually knows them has the ability to change the outcome - regardless of home life or background. Twenty teachers and a sea of kids? The math no longer works. The transition from elementary to middle school is one of the most researched inflection points in education. GPA, attendance, and engagement all drop and rarely recover later. Chronic absenteeism accelerates in middle school. And once a kid is chronically absent in 6th grade, the dropout risk in high school spikes dramatically. Boys specifically fall off harder and earlier than girls. The gender gap in reading, math and academic engagement widens significantly in middle school. The information is known. And what has the system done for generations? Introduced class-to-class middle school earlier and earlier. The programs that are winning are those who do it the other way around and go back to one class room, one set of students and, if necessary, the teacher rotates, but the kids have a home room teacher who knows them, and cares about them, and is responsible for their success. The conversation we should be having is making grade school structure the standard.





New union survey just dropped What's the number 1 reason that teachers consider leaving? Big surprise. Student behavior!










