EA Gen?

I haven’t been blogging much lately. I’ve been working on renewing my National Board Teaching Certification, I’m also applying for the Presidential Award for Science (I mean, why not?), and I’m trying to keep up with a great Games Based Learning MOOC that’s going on. Yeah, basically way more than I can chew since classes are still going on, it’s not summer yet, AND we’re getting ready to prep our 8th grade week-long outdoor learning experience (and since the 6th grade outdoor learning experience happens in the Fall we start planning that one now too – yes, I’m on both of those teams since I teach both 6th and 8th grade!). There’s a great E-mail list for those of us renewing our National Board certification. There are so many great people posting questions, answers, reading each other’s work, giving feedback, and giving advice. From those of us renewing to those who have renewed to those to have scored renewees (new word?), it’s a great list to keep up with and there are tons of emails coming through there every day. I noticed that there weren’t too many folks in my certificated area. So I went on and asked if anyone was certified in my area. No one responded.

Well, I’m certified as an Early Adolescent, ages 11-14, Generalist (EA Gen). As a Generalist I can teach a self-contained class in middle school teaching language arts, math, science, art, and social studies. I can also teach any of those as a stand-alone class. Pretty cool isn’t it? But it’s no longer being offered. Check out the certificate areas for National Board and for generalist you can be early or middle childhood but no early adolescent (only as old as 10 years, or elementary). I wonder why they gave that up? Did they decide that middle school should not have self-contained classes? Are 11 year old too old to have one teacher for all their core subjects? Was it because there weren’t too many people certifying as EA Gens? It’s weird having a certification that no longer exists.

My middle school used to have a mostly self-contained experience for 6th graders but we slowly moved away from that and now 6th graders have me for science, one teacher for math, and then one teacher for social studies and language arts (well, technically two of the three classes have one teacher for both of those). Should we have maintained our self-contained 6th grade or is having a teacher for each subject the better way to go?

There must be more EA Gens out there. I can’t be the only one. Any EA Gens out there?!