This is a lovely letter written by a woman named Stephanie Richards who blogs about all things teaching.
We wish you all the best as you start your new year. Words of wisdom from teachers who've
been there and done that are nuggets of gold.
EVERY teacher has been a new teacher once!
The blog: EAT, WRITE, TEACH.
http://www.eatwriteteach.com/2013/02/a-letter-to-first-year-teachers.html
-
Stephanie Richardson
- Stephanie is an English teacher by day, a
YA Fiction writer by night, and a foodie always. She blogs about her
adventures in the classroom, offering ridiculous anecdotes, unsolicited
advice, and silly GIFs, all sprinkled with healthy doses of sarcasm and
profanity, in the hopes that it might make the daily life of other
secondary teachers just a little bit easier.
A Letter to First-Year Teachers
It's a school day, so I feel like I should be helping someone out. It's
what I do. But we have a snowday today, so instead of helping out
students, I'm going to attempt to help out those first-year teachers out
there by offering sage advice dunked in sarcasm sauce and topped with
my favorite sentence enhancers.
*ahem*
Dear New Teacher,
You are wonderful. You are amazing. You are a saint. Thank you for what you do.
You won't hear those words enough, so I thought I'd start out with that.
My first year of teaching was pretty much horrendous. I think you can
probably expect that. There were many things that were simply awful
that were also out of my control, but I contributed to my own mess of a
year. Let me share with you some of the things I did wrong, so you can
learn from my mistakes.
- I never bothered to ask for help. I was terrified that asking for
help would be a sign of weakness, a show of incompetance. I didn't
realize that doing something incorrectly was ultimately much worse than asking for help.
- I did not manage my time wisely. I waited to make copies until right
before I needed them, I spent my prep period doing projects that didn't
need done until later rather than the things that should have been
taken care of right away.
- I gave way too much homework, more than I could ever keep up with for grading, because I thought that was what good teachers did.
- I created all of my own PowerPoints, worksheets, tests, etc. because I didn't want to take "the easy way out."
- I was very intimidated by my coworkers (who I found out too late
were wonderful, intelligent, friendly people) and I never felt confident
enough to strike up a conversation. It didn't help that I was only
twenty-two, I lived forty miles away, I wasn't married, and I still
lived in my parents' basement. They were adults. I felt like a student eating lunch with them.
- I didn't get nearly enough sleep.
- I planned a wedding.
- I never really sat down and planned my year long-term. I just planned day-by-day. BIG MISTAKE.
- I didn't plan bell to bell.
- I didn't develop a good relationship with my students in the classroom.
That's a lot of mistakes, and I'm sure there were plenty more. The good
news is that all of these have pretty simple fixes, and you can avoid a
lot
of heartache by doing some pretty simple things. Allow me to offer some
expletives-laden advice. (There are expletives because I am
a potty mouth hugely passionate about this stuff.)
- GOLDEN RULE OF TEACHING: ASK FOR HELP. This is not a
job you can do on your own without going completely insane. Most
teachers share a common personality trait in that they are happy to help
people. It goes with the trade. Most of your coworkers will be happy to
help you out (and you'll quickly discover the ones that don't want
to help, in which case you should spit in their coffee and hide their
mail). Find those experienced teachers and ask for help! They've got all
kinds of neat little tricks up their cardigan sleeves for making your
life in the classroom bearable, or maybe even pleasant.
- Time-management, for the love of everything good and holy. Figure
out your shit before you start it! Prioritize and get stuff done. Do
everything you need to complete before tomorrow, and then you
can do stuff that's more long-term. If you have to (and I do, so no
shame) make a To-Do list and number the items by priority. Make your
copies at least the day before, because I guarantee that the
morning you need to make fifty copies of an exam and first period starts
in ten minutes will be the morning that every asshole out
there is making nine hundred copies of the parts of a flower worksheet,
front and back. Either that or the copier will be broken. You know, all
that Murphy's Law shit.
- Bad teachers ignore their students needs and focus on their own.
Mediocre teachers give busy work to meet their own needs that may or may
not be what the student needs. Good teachers give a lot of homework in
the hopes that en masse activities will meet the students' needs. Great teachers give just enough really good homework that will successfully meet the needs of both the student and the teacher. What this boils down to is that you don't have to give a ton of homework if the work you do give has a lot of value. It's all about quality instead of quantity.
- It is okay to use other people's PowerPoints, worksheets, tests, and
downloadable templates. :) Really, though, sharing is caring. This ties
into Bullet #2. You simply don't have time to make every single thing
out there! My personal rule is that I like to make things when I haven't
found anything else that will satisfy. As a perfectionist, this kind of
happens a lot, but I also know that I can satisfy my perfectionist
needs by tweaking the work of others. Example: I downloaded a
PowerPoint presentation about King Arthur from the interwebs. The
PowerPoint had all of the information I hoped to convey, but it wasn't
interactive enough to suit my taste. So instead of making a PowerPoint
completely from scratch, I just added in a couple of slides with
interactive questions and activities for my students. It took ten
minutes.
- I am not good at making friends. I'm not sure why, but I'm not. It
is really important, though, that you attempt to develop some sort of a
positive relationship with your coworkers. Teaching is lonely business,
otherwise. If you aren't willing to sit at lunch with the science
teachers, at least make friends within your department and talk about
non-school stuff.
- Sleep. Seriously. Get enough sleep, especially if you're a real
bitch in the mornings like I am. I realized I was being really unfairly
cranky towards my first period class and it was really because I just
wasn't awake enough to deal with some of them. So, I started going to
bed early and waking up earlier. Nowadays I'm up two hours before I have
to be at work so I can take out the crankies on my yoga mat and on my
morning coffee. I can't tell you the difference this has made in how my
days go.
- I would seriously try to avoid any other major life changes
during your first year of teaching. Your first year of teaching will be
its own enormously huge change. You really have no idea how much this
will affect your life until your go home with whiteboard marker on your
fingertips and tape on your pants and you smell like freshmen. (Side
note: get pet Febreeze for your classroom, especially if you share
students with the P.E. teacher.)
- Plan your school year. I mean, the whole thing. Not necessarily every single day, but you should know exactly
what unit is coming up next and you should know how you're going to do
it. This year was the first time I ever did this and it
is un-freakin'-believable how much easier my life is. I sat down with a
school calendar and a list of all of the things I wanted to do this
year, and I planned my year. Keep it flexible (give yourself at least
three more days than you think you'll need for each unit to account for
fire drills, snowdays, and hangovers) but try to stick with it. I
already know that we will begin Shakespeare notes on Friday and we will
have the Romeo and Juliet test right around March 1st. I feel powerful.
- There's a saying out there along the lines of, "Idle hands make
children do evil things like stick gum under the desktop and hit each
other with rulers." Something like that. There's this cute little idea
called "bell-to-bell planning" floating in the education world Kool-Aid
right now, but it ain't no joke. I am a true-blue believer in bell
ringers, teacher time, teacher-student time, student time, and exit
slips. This is close-ish to a typical day, and dependent on the subject
matter. My day really runs smoothly like this and we get a lot
accomplished in a class period.
- Minutes 1-10: Bell ringer activity and vocab card
- Minutes 11-25: Teacher time (lectures and other such teacher-dominated teaching)
- Minutes 26-40: Teacher-student time (guided practice activities)
- Minutes 41-45: Student time (students get a headstart on homework, etc.)
- Minutes 46-50: Exit slips or other such end-of-class assessments
- Teacher-student relationship is critical in a smoothly
operating classroom. I've written in the past about how I take pride in
this nowadays. It wasn't the case my first year of teaching. I cannot
stress enough the importance of getting to know your students. This is
the motto I teach by: I don't teach English. I teach kids.
If you're still reading, you deserve a cookie or something because this is the longest letter
ever. Go on. Get up a get a cookie. I'll wait.
I'm only a third year teacher, so I'm not saying you should necessarily
take to heart everything I've said here (like spitting in coworkers'
coffee... that's probably not a good plan... that will create animosity
in the workplace). I do hope, however, that there is some merit to my
words and maybe this will keep you from making many of the same mistakes
I made my first year.
Teaching is a challenge, and it is a challenge that nothing will prepare
you for, not even subbing or student teaching. When you are a teacher,
for better or for worse, those kids are
yours. Even the most
stubborn, bull-headed, big-mouthed kid is yours and he trusts you to
take care of his needs, both as a teacher and as a positive adult role
model.
You will cry some days. You will want to pull your hair out. You will
take a sick day for the sake of mental health. You will write bad words
on a student's paper in a fury because twenty days into the Shakespeare
unit they said
Queen Elizabeth wrote the play
Romeo and Juliet and then you'll have to white them out.
But...
You will also laugh
a lot. Kids are funny, whether they mean to
be or not. I never realized how much I would laugh as a teacher. You
will have really amazing days where your lesson goes perfectly. You will
have good crying days because your non-reader finished the book you
recommended and
loved it. You will have a kid hug you one day,
for seemingly no reason and it will be a kid that you would never in a
million years have expected such a show of affection from. (Side note: I
just ended that sentence with a preposition but I can't think of a
better way to word it, so screw it. "Screw It" days will happen too.)
And best of all, you will have days where a kid or a parent thanks you
for what you do. Last year there was a parent who brought me flowers
because I stayed after school for an hour helping her son study for a
test. This winter my drama club kids got me a dozen roses and presented
them to me after our last show. Even that first year of teaching, when
things were so bad, I had a group of wonderful drama club kids who made
me a video telling me thank you for everything I had done for them. I
still cry when I think about that video and those kids.
I wish you all of the luck in the world. I'm sending good vibes your
way, I promise. Don't forget to wear your power heels or a tie to school
the first day and be a real hardass, because it is
so much easier to get nicer throughout the school year than to get tougher. Save
every single
picture, note, whatever from a student that makes you smile and hang it
up near your desk so you can look at it on bad days. The bulletin board
behind my desk is covered with student artwork, letters, and Christmas
cards (still) because they are very uplifting on bad days.
