Mr. Smith goes to middle school

I'd post a picture of me with my MSU Tutor name tag, but this sentence along with the title will serve as sufficient description. I am now a tutor in a math class at a local middle school, and wowzers is it - middle school. See, I've been working with high school kids for the past eight years or so and to suddenly jump to middle school kids was darned strange. Middle schoolers seem like high schoolers in some respects: they are very diverse in terms of intellectual development, some of them are forward-looking and others live only in the moment. Unlike many high schoolers though, all middle school kids seem to constantly be in a massive state of flux.

In our last TE302 class period before three weeks of tutoring started today, we did an exercise where everyone posted a word about their middle school experience on the wall of our classroom. Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that our class didn't have the most sanguine of middle school experiences. Only one person used "fun" as his word and there was sure a lot of "awkward" and its ilk on our walls. I think that that was an excellent reminder of just what we're stepping into with these tutoring situations, on top of all the other contextual bits and pieces we're seeing firsthand.

We have to post tutoring logs every day that answer three questions: what (describe an event), so what (name its importance), and now what (reflect on future implications). I think the compressed summer class format will yield some really intense development inside these tutoring experiences and the resulting discussions, for two reasons. First I think that being in the same classroom four days a week will lend a magnificent continuity not otherwise possible; we will become vital and supportive elements of functioning classrooms and who can resist getting pumped about that? Second, the discursive layer of reading, writing and responding to tutoring logs will be continually fresh in everyone's memory and that feels like just the right set of conditions for an honest-to-goodness three week long conversation between all of us at once. Hooray for the educational possibilities of sustained, reflective, critical dialogue!

Last thought for the day and I'll stop. We had to create a tutoring plan before starting to tutor; I turned mine in this morning, just-in-time delivery as is my wont. I wrote it as a themed paper around my favorite analogy to individual teaching encounters, that of bridge building. So today I wrote this tutoring plan and also my discussion posts for the same class, and the two had radically different tones. When I get my paper groove on I use a very specific voice in my writing: dry, intellectual, wears-big-glasses language like "to form inferential conclusions about aspects of pedagogical practice." When I wrote tutoring logs on the other hand I used decidedly casual, bloggy English like "hats off to substitute teachers!" I think both are authorial in the sense that I really do talk like both of those characters at different times, but I'm fascinated by how naturally I slip into them when the parameters of the assignment demand it. At my first tutoring day today, I used my informal banter voice most of the time, blithely tossing in "y'know" and "c'mon" and even sillier forms like "wassup with you folks?" (To my friends reading this, go ahead and have heart attacks while you imagine Orion acting like he owns this type of language.) What about you, other preservice teachers of America? Do you have one voice or many? Is this something you are (self) conscious about? When you talk to kids do you change your use of English, and if so how much depends on the kid? And the sixty four thousand dollar question - is it good to have different voices for different audiences?

I can't resist just one more, call it the sixty five thousand dollar question. Which of your authorial or conversational voices, if any do you think in?