I can not tell you how many teachers have began their career teaching Middle School and quickly started looking for a new occupation. Believe me when I tell you that if you are not prepared for the job they will eat you alive on the first week of school.

If teaching is your occupation, and you are teaching Middle School, I hope you are ready to teach teenagers and not beat yourself up about teaching Math, Science, English, Literature, or Social Studies. I get very up set when I ask a fellow teacher what they are going to teach and they tell me they are going to teach Math. This brings me to the first of the ten tips I plan to share with you as you begin a new year teaching Middle School Students.

Ten tips:

1. Never forget that you are teaching teens. If someone asks you what you teach, you tell them that you teach an awesome group of over achievers known as teens.

2. Do not try to be their friend. Many moms' and dads' have tried this. It did not work for them and it will not work for you.

3. Do not make over three class-room rules.

4. Find out what each of your students enjoys doing. Get to know what they are interested in. When you see them in the hall speak to them about things that they enjoy.

5. Seldom raise your voice. If they are out of control and you are yelling, then we really have a problem. The louder you get the louder they will get. Yelling is irrational behavior.

6. Start teaching immediately. It is a good idea to have a sponge on the board so that they will begin work as soon as they come in to class. Many problems are a result of not knowing what they are suppose to be doing.

7. It is a proven fact that students learn the most in the first ten minutes and last ten minutes of teaching. Do not waste that time. Teach the most important concepts of your lesson during this time.

8. If you find that a student has trouble behaving... do not put him or her in the front row. This enables every student to be entertained by them.

9. If you must reprimand a student do it in private. No one likes to be reprimanded in front of the whole class. I promise you it will cause you problems if you reprimand in front of everyone.

10. Do not sweat the small stuff and quit looking for what the student is doing wrong. You are not a policeman. It seems like some teachers think their only job is telling students what they can not do.

I could give you thousands of other tips and I will add to this list at a later date. I would like to close with one last thought that should make you think. What do we do when little Johnny can not read? We teach him to read. What do we do when he can not do math? We teach him how to do math. When he can not do science or social studies.... we teach. So the big question is: WHAT DO WE DO WHEN HE DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO BEHAVE? If you have told the truth, you said that you discipline him. I say we need to do what we do when he does not know how to read or write. When he does not know how to behave we need to teach him!

Hopefully these ten tips will help you as you prepare for the best year of teaching teens that you have ever had. Keep in mind, you are a teacher. You are not a policeman and you are not a friend. You must truly care about increasing their knowledge and enabling them to be the person they are meant to be.