advice to a first year teacher

Remember once upon a time when you wanted to be a teacher?

Your first year is not going to be easy. You've heard this before, but it's worth saying again and again: Your first year is not going to be easy. It's a little like having a newborn baby - you're sleep deprived, and your schedule is all messed up. You have all this responsibility for caring for little people that need constant care and attention and tend to emit loud, howling cries despite your best attempts to anticipate and respond to them appropriately. Add to this the fact that you are probably spending 8 hours a day in a flourescent-lit, institutional grey or yellow, cinderblock room that may or may not even have a window. There ought to be a new diagnosis for PNTD: Post New Teacher Depression. Brooke Shields could bring it into the public awareness by appearing on Oprah and Tom Cruise could tell all new teachers just to take vitamins.

You can expect about 25-30% of what you try to do this year to actually work. If you are lucky, about 10% will work better than you ever would have imagined. If something does not work, throw it out of your mental filing cabinet. Keep trying new things. Next year, 50-60% of your lessons will work. You should have 20% of your lessons work fabulously. That works out to two good days and one incredible day a week - just by next year. I promise that there is a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.

You are probably making the mistake of teaching over the student's heads. You remember your college classes, or your 11th and 12th grade Honors and AP classes, and, naturally, you tend to teach that way. There is nothing wrong with setting your sights and standards high - but you need to remember that your students probably don't have framework to learn what you want to teach them. Keep your standards and sights high, but really, really listen to the responses your students give when you ask questions. If they are not keeping up and mastering the concepts (and the ability to simply repeat what you've said is not mastery), then you need to break things down into smaller steps.

You may also be making the mistake of assigning too much homework. Chances are, you don't have school age children yet - so there's no way for you to know how long homework takes. Whatever you assign, double the amount of time you think it "should" take and use that doubled time as your gauge of the right amount.

Don't be afraid to call home. It's scary. I don't know for sure, but I imagine that it's probably worse than calling a girl and asking for a date. All a girl can do is turn you down. There's always the chance that a parent will get you on the phone and realize that YOU'RE ONLY TWENTY-SOMETHING AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL YOU'RE DOING OR WHY ANYONE THOUGHT YOU COULD BE PUT IN CHARGE OF ALL THESE CHILDREN. That thought alone is enough to make your heart beat so fast you don't even think you can dial the phone. Still, as terrifying as it is, you just have to force yourself to do it. It really does make classroom management 100% easier in the long run, not because the parents actually "do" anything; Because the kids know you care.

Don't spend more time grading an assignment than your students spent doing the assignment.

Give yourself time off. You've got lessons to plan and a stack of papers to grade. The students keep asking for their tests back. There are never enough hours in the day. BUT, if you don't give yourself days and nights off you will burn out and stress out and become one of the walking, teaching dead. Start with two nights a week and one weekend day when you refuse to look at anything school-related. You need it.

Every day you are becoming a better teacher. The learning curve for this job is brutal at first, but you'll grow into it quickly as long as you are self-reflective, learn from each failure and each success, and don't give up.

Remember once upon a time when you wanted to be a teacher?

Remember that.