I got a story to tell.

Yesterday, I was running errands when one of my former students stopped me at the local supermarket. She’s a manager there and she told me, “Mr. Vilson, did you do something recently that I should be congratulating you for?”

Me: “I think so? I just passed my doctoral dissertation defense.”
Her: “Oh yeah! My sister showed me something about it, so congratulations!”
Me: “Thank you! And really, I couldn’t have gotten it without you, your sister, or my other former students, so thank you! Also, I’m proud of you!”

She did a cutesy back-kick and hands-to-chin pose and said, “Thanks!”

Moments like the one are when I’m grateful that I never lost sight of my higher purpose for my work. Up to that point, I had spent weeks stressing whether I’d even have the chance to defend my doctoral work. These signs from the universe keep moving me forward as I build this work in the university.

My son got to witness all of this as we perused the local market. Fresh off a second round of edits, I needed reminders of why I embarked on the journey to begin with. Back in 2019, I applied because I felt called to study the teaching profession with race and policy in mind. In 2020, a global pandemic put these societal troubles front and center. In August, I endeavored on sociology, a field that pulls together a myriad of factors to theorize how the world works.

Teaching middle schoolers, by comparison, is more aligned to that task than folks imagine.

A Little About Middle School

When I tell people I taught middle school, they’d say “You’re brave; I was an awkward person in middle school!” Cool. Yet, when I told other educators that I taught middle school, they’d say “Oh, I could NEVER! I like where I am, and it takes a special kind of person to want to teach there.” Thanks for the vote of confidence.

Some of it is because middle school, almost by definition, is awkward.

Thinking more socially, middle school usually represents students’ transition into a new level of learning. Middle school means that most students go from having one teacher for most subjects to having several specialized teachers. Meanwhile, children’s bodies and minds are changing rapidly in ways they don’t fully understand. We call it adolescence. This includes puberty, but also a myriad of other adjustments and quirks in children’s lives that don’t have predestined formulas.

But the middle school experience taught me a lot. Yes, it taught me a plethora of patience and perseverance. It also showed me how I could have 30 students in front of me, and it still felt like 60 students depending on which personalities they came with.

As schedules and student appointments changed the entire vibe of a class, I learned adaptability and flexibility. A gift, I swear. I saw how my relationships with the students mattered more than my preconceived notions of them based on their labels. I also learned how, depending on the current events or school episode (yes, in middle school, it was usually an episode), students felt like they couldn’t move forward until some adults sought to address it with empathy and care. On multiple occasions, I took a step back from all of this and asked “What factors allowed for this?”

In other words, I was a practicing sociologist without even knowing it. In fact, much of my epistemological thinking took hold when I named how interwoven factors of policy, practice, and capital kept informing our relationships to our work and each other. Sociology.

A Little About Research

When I become a researcher, I noticed two dualing concepts about the work of the academy and schools. For one, the research ethos encourages us to lean away so that our presence within a phenomena doesn’t cloud our judgment. Or something like that. Of course, and unlike other fields, sociology is harder to study because we’re part of society and all its apparatuses. Secondly, when our interests reflect our personal study, people would say that the research is “me-search.” This suggests that researchers, even ones studying sociology, should find work that feels disconnected enough from the researcher to maintain a level of objectivity. (By the way, that “me-search” has derogatory undertones for some.)

Yet, my experiences in the classroom helped me navigate much of the ambiguity in understanding not just what questions I need to ask of the literature (How did No Child Left Behind open the door to market-based reforms? Why did teachers act so viscerally to the many changes to the profession? What does race and class have to do with this?), but also how I interpreted participants’ interviews, especially the folks who didn’t know me or my work as well. When you’re only given an hour to talk to someone, you need to pick up the nuances and quickly. It matters that the researcher has a deep understanding about subtexts and common parlance.

In other words, my research wasn’t me-search but we-search.

What The Students Do

To their credit, my former students informed how I navigated the research, too. In his AERA Presidential Speech, Dr. Rich Milner discussed the idea of consequentialism in education i.e. the extent to which research or anything else actually has an impact on the subjects being studied. Luckily, I didn’t have to look much further than the students. I spent years listening to students telling me which teachers they didn’t like (sometimes, myself included) and why, or how their education conflicted with their aspirations in their lives. I let their ideas change me and humble as a person and as a teacher. At times, I threw away a lesson plan or two so I could truly hear out students in their voices.

So, when it came to this work, I was asking teachers of color about professionalism, but many times, I had their voices in my head asking me to ask adults about themselves and whether they cared deeply enough about students. I had a few moments where I would have been fine settling for what I had, I recalled how often I insisted that my students push themselves to do well for their present and future learning. In return, I also pushed myself to teach better so they could learn better.

Because if I had to ask myself these questions that students asked me, so did the teachers I would interview.

And that’s ultimately why middle school prepared me for social science work. There’s been much said about the way that education researchers don’t have substantative experience in the things they’re researching. The idealized model researcher, coming from on high, develops solutions without authentic roots to the schools they study because they need to have that intellectual distance to have validity. Researchers who know good teaching see educators as their intellectual equal, theories and all. Too many don’t.

Teaching middle school has a distinct advantage, too. Where people see elementary schoolers as “babies” and higher schoolers as “pre-adults,” middle schoolers require the deep listening, concentration, and kind candor in the midst of individual, collective, and societal turbulence all at once. Yes, I can point to the number of former students who’ve become teachers in their own right (and thank me in part for it).

But I like to think I became a doctor of philosophy thanks to them, whether they became teachers or not. I was learning from them all along the way.