“When I first started teaching, we had to go to a computer lab,” Mrs. Carrie Guild, history teacher for the All Stars team, laughed. “There were no laptops, kids didn’t have phones, there were no iPads.” 

Mrs. Guild began teaching in 2002 at Sandburg Middle School. She taught there for two years before moving to Irving Middle School, where she taught for nine years. She currently teaches seventh grade history at RCMS. She began teaching at RCMS nine years ago. This year, she will celebrate her 20th year of teaching.

Education has evolved since she first started teaching. Technology plays a much more prominent role in classrooms today than ever before. 

“You all are so obsessed with devices — it’s scary!” said Mrs. Guild. “The Gen Z that I taught, I don’t know how you’re all the same generation. There’s no way.”

Middle schoolers now worry about things like Instagram and Twitter, but it wasn’t always that way. A surge of social media use in recent years has brought with it a lot of new ways to communicate, but it has also brought a lot of new problems.

“The kids’ problems are even different because there was no social media. Their problems before were like friends and the typical growing up challenges,” she said.

Despite a rise in social media use, however, some problems have remained the same.

“Some of the problems are still the same, like friendships, balancing school and sports, activity pressure, siblings fighting, and coming to middle school. Kids are finding their way, finding who they are, and my job in that way has not changed,” Mrs. Guild stated.

Middle school is a time of self-discovery. Studies say that teenagers are more likely to make rash decisions because the brain is still developing. This hasn’t changed over the last 20 years.

“A 12- or 13-year-old, you’re the same. That hasn’t changed. You’re still growing- you’re still odd,” she laughed. “You’re all trying to find yourself. There’s that quirkiness yet independence yet you still need us. That hasn’t changed.”

Overall, Mrs. Guild believes that while some things have stayed the same, education has evolved a lot in the last 20 years.

“I feel like we had more freedoms when I first started. It was just more fun. There was a lot more creativity that a teacher could use back then, and now, I understand why, but you just have to be more careful. Our world is just different,” she said.

Mrs. Guild says that the best part of teaching is seeing her students after they leave middle school.

“I love running into them when I’m not in school and catching up to find out what they are doing and seeing how they have grown,” she said. “I like to think that I had a little piece of helping and shaping them to grow into the individuals they have become.”