Essay on the student-teacher relationship

Student teacher relationship – A deterioration in the teacher-student relationship often occurs after the transition from elementary school to middle school.

Post-transition”(middle school) teachers are perceived by students to be less friendly, supportive, and caring than pre-transition teachers. This transition is characterized by major changes in the organization, curriculum, and curriculum implementation.

The teacher-student relationship flourishes in a self-contained classroom, while it flounders with departmentalized instruction. At the middle school level, the focus of teachers is on the subject matter they teach; secondary teachers often view themselves as dispensers of information.

Emphasis upon students may be weakened, as “the impressions, speculations, and recollections that paint a complete picture of a student are often dispersed among too many people.

In a self-contained classroom, a teacher has only one class of students; therefore, that teacher’s knowledge and supervision of students, their personal and academic needs, is much greater than that of a teacher at the middle school level who instructs several classes each day. Middle school teachers teach an average of 165 students each day.

Student-teacher relationship

Class periods range from 45- 55 minutes in length; the national average is 51 minutes. As the number of classes increases, the amount of time spent with each class, and therefore each student, decreases, as do the opportunities for the formation of close teacher-student relationships.

Research has confirmed that in larger classes teachers spend much of their time concentrating on classroom management. As students transition between elementary and secondary school, “they become increasingly bored and alienated from school” and see little relevance of school knowledge to their personal lives and futures.

The fragmentation of the typical middle school curriculum supports the thinking of many early adolescents that school is no significant. A typical twelve-year-old’s view of school may sound like this: “When you only have to do English for forty-five minutes a day and nobody else cares about complete sentences and spelling and stuff, then you figure those things can’t be all that important except to the English teacher.