We have three “Access periods” each week, because good middle schools have things like that. It’s in all the literature. Our access groups are students selected at random from 6th-8th grade. Once you have someone in your access group they stay with you until they enter high school. We don’t know what happens to them after that. So we’re pretty much stuck with the kids that we get unless you can convince another teacher to trade with you.
I have the best access group. It was a little experiment in self-fulfilling prophesy. When we first started doing these groups I told mine that they were the best access group. We fed off the fact that we happened to win the first inter-access group contest, and now they are the easiest group of middle students to work with ever. The 8th graders make the 7th graders tow the line and 6th graders are all terrified of me.
This week we’re talking about bullying, and to introduce it we showed The Karate Kid to the rugrats*. It works well for an introduction, and when we first did this 2 years ago I made up a Karate Kid “talking points” cheat sheet for our teachers to use to lead the discussions. It’s an interesting movie to use, because it’s got the swears, drinking, smoking, fighting and racism in it, but it’s incorporated in a way that makes it easy to turn each one of those into a useful discussion. I think next time we show it I’ll include all of the swears in my introduction so the students aren’t shocked when they hear them in the movie.
We tried something new this time. We took a long sheet of paper from the art teacher and combined the two 12×12 screens into one huge 12×24 screen and showed it in letterbox. It worked surprisingly well.
*I said “rugrats” because I knew Annette would jump all over me in the comments if I said “kids”.