Disrespect... or acting their age?

I recently finished mentoring a student from a local university for his student-teaching experience. It was a good time of sharing ideas about students, curriculum, and the education system, but a couple of topics seemed to come up repeatedly... student behavior and classroom discipline.

Over the last few years, I have learned to differentiate between a student being disrespectful in class and one showing behavior that is appropriate for their age.
You see... it is easy to confuse the two and treat them the same, but that would be damaging to the relationship with your students and the long term management of your classroom.

Yes... sometimes kids decide to mouth off, overreact, and get themselves in trouble, but many times they are just acting their age, and things are escalated by the adults around them. Is having some boys horseplaying in the classroom or dealing with girls gossiping and being hurtful to each other the best part of my job? No, but that behavior is not from them intending to disrespect me, but more out of their not yet learning to control their impulses/behaviors in different environments.

Where the problem occurs is my reaction to the kids. I have found that the majority of the disruptions in my class come from age appropriate behavior and few come from a disrespect towards me. However, that reverses when educators fail to see the teaching moment in the students' poor choice of behavior and overreact to the situation. Treating the child's age-appropriate behavior as a personal attack on who they are as a teacher and their authority in the classroom only serves to escalate the emotional response. This often ends up with a student in the office not completely understanding what happened and with another story of an emotional, yelling teacher to tell their friends...and from there, the cycle continues. Kids behave like kids. Teachers take it personally and yell. Kids mistrust teachers.

I know... I know.... sometimes it really annoys us adults having to deal with childish behavior over and over, but shouldn't it be an opportunity to teach them a better way? Besides, according to this article, that behavior may be just what they MUST live through to be a productive adult in the future.