I started working with 6th graders in the 2024-2025 academic year. This time my sixth graders were from the Eastern School-Garden, students of Nara Nikoghosyan. The blog-based education implemented in our Mkhitar Sebastatsi EduComplex had given me the opportunity to study my future students’ blogs during the summer, and before they came to Middle School, I already partially knew my students, had a rough idea about their preferences, interests, and abilities. Through the videos, I already knew most of them by face.
The last time I worked with 11-12 year olds was about seven years ago. I love working with the same learners for many years. I am interested in following their physical, mental and spiritual growth. I worked with my previous sixth graders for 7 academic years until they graduated from 12th grade this year. Blog based teaching-learning process has one important advantage. When I read the posts from previous years every year, I clearly see the growth that my students have. These observations are also quite interesting from a pedagogical point of view.
Now the thoughts of my 2024-2025 sixth graders are being collected in the blog “It’s me”. It gives me a great opportunity to study, make comparisons, and draw conclusions.
Let me say that working with this age group again was a new challenge for me. I have been involved in pedagogy for a long time, but I was worried about the thought of going through this unpredictable age again. Who are these new sixth graders, what similarities and differences do they have compared to their predecessors? Does this generation have a peculiarity, or will the experience of working with the previous ones be completely sufficient? I feel the rapid passage of time very well. I see that day by day new developments and changes are taking place both in the development of technology and in human relationships, value systems, and worldview. I think we are witnessing the process of forming a new person. In my personal space, in my large family, I communicate with five persons studying or working in the schools of Mkhitar Sebastatsi EduComplex. It is understandable that they are different individuals. But I also see that their qualitative difference is clearly increasing year by year. I cannot say good or bad. Simply, a child born with a difference of six years, nine years is no longer the same, they differ from their older siblings in some important characteristic.
Now, seven years later, these new sixth graders… It was somewhat comforting that I was communicating with a student of that age at home, we were connected by close family ties. But knowing that one Sebastatsi student very closely was more worrying than calming me down. I understood that I would be dealing with a completely new generation – with new qualities, new interests, and moreover, with a new value system. Entering new classrooms has one commonality, one issue that is almost universal for all age groups. You enter a space where they don’t know you, where you are a stranger, where they simply don’t trust you. Here, neither your years of experience matter, nor your earned authority, nor your fruitful pedagogical journey – nothing matters. You are being examined and studied with attentive, investigating eyes by people fifty or more years younger than you. But can you call these people small? I have always been and remain of the opinion that a person is never small, and they should be treated as an equal – without underestimating or overestimating them. The important thing is that these relationships are not artificial, but natural and sincere.
Trust is almost always lacking in newly starting relationships. In this case, the students as well as you do not trust each other. We don’t know what to expect from each other: what is the teacher capable of, what are the students capable of? And you find yourself in the role of a tightrope walker. Any slip can lead to a painful fall. The examining gazes of 11-12-year-old naughty students are fixed on you – with expectation, testing-questioning undertones, trying to figure out how much freedom they will be given, or if any freedom will be given at all. And will they be able to play on their phones, and will you figure out that instead of doing the assignment, they are doing something else on the computer, chatting with each other, accessing other websites or watching videos? When you approach, they quickly switch screens – will you understand what happened? If they copy the assignment from another student’s blog, will you know about it? And do you know about chatGPT? If chatGPT does the assignments instead of them, will you figure it out, and many other such things…
The challenges are many, and pedagogy is interesting to me because it raises many problems, problems that require solutions, without these solutions you cannot move forward, you will be stomping in the same place, doing ineffective work. And teachers know that if you don’t see the effectiveness of your work, among many other things, it severely affects your well-being. From the general educational community, those learners who have managed to acquire the name and reputation of “class disruptors”, over several years immediately stand out, and they carry this reputation with honor, they like it and don’t want to lose it. These are usually those learners who may have a lack of attention, want to be in the spotlight in some way, and since they cannot stand out in other ways, they choose this form of getting into the center.
Another problem that teachers face when teaching new classes is relationships with parents. We all know that especially in elementary school, parents are more attentive and consistent regarding their children’s academic progress. I was particularly surprised by the following fact. 6th graders are excellent at online skills, quickly responding to electronic messages, and have a habit of establishing and maintaining communication through emails. This makes the teacher’s job much easier and ensures continuity of learning. When reading a student’s blog, you can immediately write to the student individually, make your comments and observations, ask questions and expect answers. And the response is not delayed. Students generally respond very quickly. But to my surprise, sometimes the parent responds to your question through the student’s email, trying to answer your question and respond to your observations. Why? Isn’t email a personal space? Why does the parent enter that space, don’t they trust their child? Perhaps this is why there are students who immediately delete emails containing your observations and questions directed to them. And when you try to find out the next day in class why you haven’t received a response and ask them to open your sent email, it turns out that the student has deleted it and thrown it in the trash. It’s understandable that the student resorts to such actions out of fear or desire not to disappoint their parent. But what drives a student to lie is already bad and pedagogically unacceptable. How angry does the parent get, or how do they show disappointment, that their child prefers to lie to both the parent and the teacher? What’s the benefit here, how does such an approach contribute to the proper upbringing of the student? These are questions that you must answer yourself, problems that no one but you can solve.