What Does it Take to Be Successful in Middle School? Be Crazy

To get middle schoolers attention, I think you need to be a little bit crazy.  That's not my strength.  My strengths are lesson planning, differentiation, and building relationships with the kids, but not being crazy and off-beat and entertaining.

When I student taught in middle school, my supervising teacher had been (honestly) a magician in Vegas before he became a teacher.  Every really good middle school teacher seems to have a "gimmick" or a way to get kids attention, whether its something consistent, or something out of the blue....Surprise candy, music, old stories, etc....some kind of "cool" factor.

When I was in 8th grade, my Social Studies teacher was a retired long-time army man. He still looked and acted very military, and that was entertaining to 8th graders.

My husband told me a story about someone he knew.  This person had broken ribs and had a cast on their torso, but it didn't show under his shirt, so the kids didn't know it was there.  It was a windy day and his tie kept blowing up and getting in his face.  He grabbed the stapler off of his desk and stapled his tie to his chest.  He said the kids behaved perfectly the rest of the day.


I know another teacher who keeps some blooper videos and funniest home videos on a flash drive. He will sometimes play them to get kids attention, or as a reward at the end of class.  Here is a compilation of funniest America's Funniest Home Videos to get you started...

When we have spirit week I do dress up, and the kids get a big kick of out it.   But how to carry some of that through the rest of the year?


Do you think that's an integral part of teaching?  Especially of teaching middle school?  What other funny stories or unique teachers do you know of?

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Getting the Most Bang for your Pin

I apologize for the blogging break.  I have not been feeling well, and have been really overwhelmed and sick and tired, so blogging had to take a backseat.  I'm still not feeling 100%, but slowly improving and with the day off, I'm trying to do a little bit of blogging while I take it easy on the couch.

One of my best finds, which surfing the internet is this site.

Do you use Pinterest, either to promote products or to share ideas and save pictures that you like?   If so, you may be curious which boards are getting the most traffic, which items you have already pinned to which boards, and if they are getting re-pinned or not.

I have been trying to come up with a way to keep track of my pins, and make sure I am handling them the best way that I can.  I couldn't come up with something that seemed workable.  I did a bunch of google searching.

You have to set up an account, and then wait a day or 2 for it to collect data.  After that, there is a gold mine of information.

It will show you things like:

• All the items to have pinned to each board, along with the date.
• The number of followers for each board you belong to.
• The number of repins that each pin has gotten.
• You can even export your data to CSV if you really want to analyze

Here are a few screenshots to give you an idea.  Wow!  This has potential, I think! 

Hope this is some help to you.  They are in the process of changing the interface, so I have seen a few slightly different things when I login, but there is a ton of information in there!