My students needed pencils, paper, & basic classroom supplies. 
In regards to basic needs, like water, food, etc., my students didn’t require much from me. What my students did need were more school supplies. The things I handed out most were pencil and paper, especially once we reached second semester. I also had to supply markers, color pencils, scissors, glue, and project paper if I wanted my students to do anything other than worksheets. Our textbooks were the same editions I used in middle school and high school. Students came to school unprepared - for various reasons - and it fell on me to provide the supplies they needed.
 

My students needed to read more. 
Even some of my best students struggled to read a text and comprehend what had happened. I had tried reading as a class, reciprocal reading, group reading, and individual reading with guiding questions, but my students didn’t like to slow down while they read. They simply didn't enjoy reading for the sake of reading. So I tried to provide more reading opportunities where they choose what they read in the classroom. During the summer between my first and second year of teaching, I went through my personal collection of books and selected 100+ books to share with my students in a classroom library.
 

My students needed to be challenged.
Many students would call me over during assignments and even tests to double check answers or essentially ask for an answer to one of the questions. This need to have the exact right answer and to ask the teacher when they didn’t immediately know told me they were used to being given the answers. I was frustrated by students who immediately fell back on “I don’t know”, no matter how much I broke down the question into increasingly simpler parts. The I-don’t-knows and the whining at the start of new assignments made me want to give up sometimes, to ask less of them, to let them have it their way. Whether they recognized it or not, though, being challenged in thinking, reading, and their education as a whole, was only beneficial to them.
 

My students needed discipline and routine. 
My students need to realize that every action has a consequence, good or bad. If they didn’t study for a test, they could do poorly. If they slept through class, they would receive a zero on the day’s assignment. Continued misbehavior would result in further negative consequences. My students reacted in various ways to receiving consequences. Some grumbled, some pouted, some decided to space out for the rest of class, some tried to argue, and some asked for another chance even though you had already given them five warnings to stop talking before escalating to a new consequence. The last one was an especially annoying characteristic of discipline in my middle school classroom because the students didn't want to accept the consequences of their actions even after they realized I had been serious all along. The best thing I could do for my students was to be consistent and as fair as possible
 

My students needed choices.
I realized early in my second year of teaching, after reading Whatever It Takes by Paul Tough, that many of my students were coming from home environments where an adult presence was largely absent (this I knew) and they were used to making their own choices on how they spent their time (this I hadn't considered previously). As such, these students would understandably find a classroom where they weren't allowed to act independently and make their own choices to be especially stifling and abrasive. This isn't to say you should submit all control to your students as that would be the opposite of a structured classroom environment. So I found smaller ways to incorporate student choice in the classroom, like how they summarized a story, creating their own discussion questions, or voting on the general topic of our next current events article.
 

My students needed pride in their work. 
How do you get an underperforming student to care about their classwork? I'm not sure I found a true solution to this issue. Grades are a form of extrinsic motivation and the threat of low grades only works so long to encourage a student to get focused and get to work. My students, and this is generalization, cared more about completing an assignment over the quality of work they produced. The Star Student board in my classroom was useful in building student pride in two ways: 1) I tried to highlight good work from students who normally don't receive As or Bs and 2) to showcase what I consider to be quality student work. I knew it was worthwhile when students flocked around the board and called out, "Mine's up there!"
 

My students needed a teacher.
I cared way too much about what my students thought of me. Their opinions about me personally shouldn’t matter. My students didn’t need a friend or a doormat, though. They a needed a teacher that had high expectations, that made them work, that made them use their brains, and that took control of the classroom. So what if they thought I was mean for giving consequences for talking? Or if they thought my classroom was boring because they had to complete work instead of goof off? They needed teachers that expected them to learn and that created an environment in which they could learn. Being that teacher was a long-term project of mine, and hopefully I took steps – even baby steps – in the right direction every day.