16,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Make your first year of teaching one to remember Becoming a new teacher is one of the most fun, exciting, and challenging experiences you'll encounter in your life. Who wouldn't want a little help getting ready before sitting down behind the teacher's desk for the first time? That's where First-Year Teaching For Dummies comes in. You'll find easy-to-follow strategies and techniques to help you navigate the politics of education in your community, develop fun and fulfilling relationships with your students, and refine your own instructional style. You'll learn to: * Survive and thrive in your first two weeks as you hit the ground running and win over your students, co-workers, and administrators * Avoid or reduce the major stressors that can lead to burnout and other common problems * Understand and handle 21st-century issues with skill and sensitivity It's almost time for you to take charge of your first classroom and you're raring to go. So, grab a copy of First-Year Teaching For Dummies to find the last-minute tips and common-sense guidance you need to help make your first school year a rewarding one!
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 712
Ähnliche
First-Year Teaching For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com
Copyright ©2023 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Trademarks: Wiley, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, Dummies.com, Making Everything Easier, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
LIMIT OF LIABILITY/DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY: WHILE THE PUBLISHER AND AUTHORS HAVE USED THEIR BEST EFFORTS IN PREPARING THIS WORK, THEY MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS WORK AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. NO WARRANTY MAY BE CREATED OR EXTENDED BY SALES REPRESENTATIVES, WRITTEN SALES MATERIALS OR PROMOTIONAL STATEMENTS FOR THIS WORK. THE FACT THAT AN ORGANIZATION, WEBSITE, OR PRODUCT IS REFERRED TO IN THIS WORK AS A CITATION AND/OR POTENTIAL SOURCE OF FURTHER INFORMATION DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE PUBLISHER AND AUTHORS ENDORSE THE INFORMATION OR SERVICES THE ORGANIZATION, WEBSITE, OR PRODUCT MAY PROVIDE OR RECOMMENDATIONS IT MAY MAKE. THIS WORK IS SOLD WITH THE UNDERSTANDING THAT THE PUBLISHER IS NOT ENGAGED IN RENDERING PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. THE ADVICE AND STRATEGIES CONTAINED HEREIN MAY NOT BE SUITABLE FOR YOUR SITUATION. YOU SHOULD CONSULT WITH A SPECIALIST WHERE APPROPRIATE. FURTHER, READERS SHOULD BE AWARE THAT WEBSITES LISTED IN THIS WORK MAY HAVE CHANGED OR DISAPPEARED BETWEEN WHEN THIS WORK WAS WRITTEN AND WHEN IT IS READ. NEITHER THE PUBLISHER NOR AUTHORS SHALL BE LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFIT OR ANY OTHER COMMERCIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR OTHER DAMAGES.
For general information on our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax 317-572-4002. For technical support, please visit https://hub.wiley.com/community/support/dummies.
Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023940441
ISBN 978-1-394-18976-2 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-394-18978-6 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-394-18977-9 (ebk)
First-Year Teaching For Dummies®
To view this book's Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for “First-Year Teaching For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Where to Go from Here
Part 1: What They Didn’t Teach You in College
Chapter 1: What Have You Gotten Yourself Into?
Real World versus School World
Bearing the Instructor’s Burden
You’re the Adult Now!
Facing the Daily Grind
Chapter 2: Dealing with Society’s Nutty Notions about Teaching
“Those Who Can, Do; Those Who Can’t, Teach”
Establishing Your Competence
Looking Inside Those “Educational Studies”
Forgetting Those Education Classes
Chapter 3: How Things Have Changed in the Classroom
Changes for the Better
Changes for the Worse
What’s With These Kids Today?
Part 2: Managing Your Classroom
Chapter 4: Finding Your Way Around
Topping Your To-Do List: Read the Rule Book
Establishing Your Rules
Getting Your Bearings
Mapping Out Important Locations
Chapter 5: Setting Up Your Classroom
Building Blue-Ribbon Bulletin Boards
Choosing a Seating Arrangement
Establishing an Inviting Classroom
Staying Afloat If You’re a Floater
Chapter 6: The First Week of School
Making That Important First Impression
Don’t Smile until December?
Identifying Important First-Week Tasks
Dressing Appropriately
Chapter 7: Keeping Your Classroom Under Control
Understanding What the Front Office Expects from You
Motivating Students
Facing Bad Behavior Head On
Recognizing Ineffective Models of Confrontation
Getting Discipline Right
Chapter 8: Picking Your Battles
Making the Punishment Fit the Crime
Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie
Taking Things Personally
Passing the Problem (Child) to the Principal: When and How
Part 3: Delivering Instruction
Chapter 9: Finding Your Style
Creating Lesson Plans
Honing Your Performance
Making Learning Equitable
Chapter 10: Making Learning Fun
Teaching with Class Games
Adding the Little Things
Chapter 11: Managing Assessment
Establishing a Grading System
Mastering the Tricks of the Grading Trade
Part 4: Meet the Supporting Cast
Chapter 12: Getting to Know Your Administrators
A Field Guide to Administrators
Dealing with Dueling Bosses
Overcoming Observations
Chapter 13: Getting to Know Your Coworkers
A Field Guide to Coworkers
Paying Your Dues
Understanding Staff Members
Chapter 14: Getting to Know Parents
A Field Guide to Parents
Phoning Home
Surviving Parent Conferences
Chapter 15: Getting to Know Students
Teaching Different Academic Levels
A Field Guide to Students
Figuring Out What Kids Want
Part 5: Non-Instructional Duties
Chapter 16: Implicit and Explicit Duties
Doing Your Duty
The Joys of Sponsorship
Life after School
Developing Professionally
Chapter 17: Taming Administrative Tasks
Hiking the Daily Recordkeeping Trail
Scripting Scintillating Substitute Plans
Chapter 18: Protecting Students Under Your Care
Navigating Common Health Concerns
Handling Injuries and Emergencies
Referring Students for Professional Help and Intervention
Establishing a Safe Place for Students
Facing Difficult Truths about Sexual Harassment
Avoiding the Appearance of Evil
Part 6: The Part of Tens
Chapter 19: Ten Things That Always Happen to First-Year Teachers
You’ll Have Problems Pacing Yourself
A Harmless Comment You Make Will Be Misinterpreted
Your Students Will Google You
A Spill or Stain Will Embarrass You
An Administrator Will Infuriate You
You’ll Find Out What the Kids Really Think of You
A Parent Will Complain about You
Something Completely Unexpected Will Happen
You’ll Receive Unexpected Praise
A Student Will Greet You in Public
Chapter 20: The Ten Biggest First-Year Teacher Blunders
Becoming Too Friendly Too Early
Teaching for the Wrong Reasons
Coming to School Unprepared
Reacting Before You Stop to Think
Refusing to Back Down When You’re Wrong
Neglecting to Look in the Mirror
Disassociating from Your Colleagues
Acting Like Your Kids
Not Practicing What You Preach
Forgetting That Kids Are Just Kids
Chapter 21: Ten Tips for Teaching Online
Master Your Digital Learning Platform
Offer Virtual Office Hours
Provide Students a Place to Collaborate
Figure Out How to Disable Student Microphones and Cameras
Have Everyone Blur Their Camera Backgrounds
Use a Variety of Methods to Assess Students
Offer Incentives for Participating in Class
Provide Timely and Effective Feedback
Communicate Regularly through Different Channels
Record Your Lessons
Index
About the Authors
Advertisement Page
Connect with Dummies
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
FIGURE 2-1: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid, as you’ve been taught.
FIGURE 2-2: Kelley’s hierarchy of needs for an adolescent.
Chapter 5
FIGURE 5-1: The dance-floor seating chart in all its finery.
FIGURE 5-2: The runway-model seating chart — for when you’re feeling fierce.
FIGURE 5-3: The independent-nation-state seating chart.
FIGURE 5-4: Café 307 is a respite for students, and if students have coffee wai...
Chapter 9
FIGURE 9-1: How a right-handed teacher should work the smartboard. Lefties do i...
Chapter 13
FIGURE 13-1: Carol with Big Joe at his retirement party.
Guide
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Index
About the Authors
Pages
iii
iv
1
2
3
4
5
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
319
320
321
322
323
325
326
327
328
329
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
345
346
347
348
349
Introduction
Teaching is a profession adorned with platitudes, and when you’re in training, you hear them all. They are well-intentioned, as are the people who are constantly posting them to your social media accounts, but they’re not particularly helpful. Here are a few quotes that elicit a groan whenever we read them. Each is attributed to the people generally recognized as the original source:
“If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society’s heroes.” – Guy Kawasaki
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." – Henry Adams
“Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.” – Japanese proverb
“I’m hot for teacher. I’ve got it bad, so bad. I’m hot for teacher. Whoa.” – Van Halen
All these inspirational quotes are meant to tell you that teaching is an important job, that educating the next generation is a noble goal, but no one is arguing that fact. Everyone knows teachers are important and underappreciated. Here’s something people may not know: Teaching is hard.
Legendary interviewer Terry Gross, host of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, explained it honestly and succinctly in a recent television appearance. She started her professional career as an eighth-grade teacher. “I got my BA in English, with a teaching certificate. I was literally fired in six weeks, for not being able to keep control of a class, or even keep them in a class.” Her teacher training did not prepare her for the realities of a classroom.
Even if you don’t struggle with classroom management, there are plenty of other challenges you’ll face as a first-year teacher. Can you manage your time well? Can you communicate with parents and administrators effectively? Can you make your instructional content interesting enough to hold the attention of a class full of fifth-graders right after lunch?
Once you’re actually in the classroom, the reality of teaching erodes the idealized version most of us have built up in our minds. Things you may have shrugged off at first — the low pay, the increasingly charged politicization of education, a massive at-home workload, and the expectation that you’ll work all hours of the day and night — make you wonder why you chose the path you did. It’s stressful. It’s isolating. It’s hard.
A 2022 study conducted by Merrimack College and EdWeek Research finds “a deep disillusionment of many teachers who feel overworked, underpaid, and under-appreciated.” After surveying more than 1,000 teachers, they found that only 12 percent of respondents were very happy with their jobs, and almost half of those surveyed were planning to quit the teaching profession entirely within the next two years. Why is this happening? Why are people who were so eager to teach leaving in droves so quickly?
We believe that teacher preparation is failing our new teachers. You don’t need platitudes. You don’t need inspirational quotes. You don’t need a 5 percent discount on school supplies purchased during the first week of August if you present a valid school ID (exclusions apply, see store for details). You need help. You need support. You need to know what you’re getting into and what you should do when things go wrong. That’s where this book comes in.
About This Book
Every first-year teacher needs an experienced teacher mentor — someone they can trust, someone who’s made mistakes and learned from them, someone who can give them useful advice. Those people are hard to find. The three of us didn’t have a mentor like that when we started teaching, so we learned the hard way. Over our many years in the profession, we slowly accumulated advice based on our own experiences, the cautionary tales of mistakes we (and others around us) made, and the occasional solid-gold nugget of advice panned from colleagues’ hard-earned wisdom.
Over and over, we found ourselves saying, “If only I’d known that when I was new — it would have saved me so much trouble!” That’s why we wrote this book. There’s no reason that every new teacher should have to build their own bedrock of institutional knowledge and go it alone. We wanted to take all that advice and experience and distill it into one volume so that you are better prepared to succeed right away.
Although we, as a diverse team of three, have a broad knowledge base, we wanted more for this book. We wanted to present a comprehensive view of teaching from many different perspectives and stakeholders in the educational process, so we talked to lots of different people, including
Prospective teaching candidates, to find out what they were the most nervous about
Student teachers, to identify pain points and skills they needed to develop
First-year teachers, who shared stories both inspirational and tragic
Experienced teachers, who have seen and dealt with it all
Principals, who explained what they expect from first-year teachers
District administrators, who provided insight about how they evaluate new teachers
School staff, who provided insight into the day-to-day operations of a school and how they interface with teachers
Former students, to figure out what teachers do to make their lives better or worse
We’ve tried to anticipate every important decision or situation you’ll face during your first year teaching so that you’re prepared to respond. You’ll find tons of real-life examples and plenty of those “Here’s what you shouldn’t do” stories (some of them, unfortunately, starring us). This is our way of helping you measure how deep the water is before you dive in.
Foolish Assumptions
We don’t assume much about you in this book, other than that you’re probably involved in — or just finishing — a college or postgraduate educational program. You know all the theory, you can write a lesson plan, and you’re filled to the gills with educational psychology. We aren’t going to revisit any of this well-trod ground. Instead, we’re going to focus on practical advice.
One assumption we don’t make is the grade level you’re teaching or planning to teach. When we were writing, a lot of people asked us, “Is this going to be a book for elementary teachers or secondary teachers?” The answer is: Both. Carol taught elementary school, Flirtisha taught middle and high school, and Mike taught high school and college classes. When we sat down to plan out the book, we discovered over and over again that the same advice applied, regardless of the age group you’re teaching. In some rare cases, some tips are more applicable to students of a specific age, and we call that out when it occurs.
Icons Used in This Book
Here and there, sprinkled in the margins of the book, you’ll find little pictures that point to important parts of the text. Here are the icons we use and what they mean:
These little nuggets of advice can save you valuable time or prevent headaches in the future. It’s sage advice from teachers who have already suffered the slings and arrows of bad decisions.
Think of these warnings as little flags that a minesweeper has placed in the field before you so that you know where you can safely step and where you definitely can’t.
File these things away in your mind because, somewhere down the road, you’ll be glad you did.
We wrote this book as a team, so we generally speak as a consensus. Occasionally, one of us will share a personal anecdote or speak in the first person, so we include one of these icons to indicate which of us is talking.
Beyond the Book
In addition to the pages you’re reading right now, this book comes with a free, access-anywhere online Cheat Sheet that summarizes some of our key advice at a glance. To access this Cheat Sheet, go to www.dummies.com, and type first-year teaching cheat sheet in the search box.
Where to Go from Here
We think the first three chapters provide important context for the rest of the book — they help differentiate this book from most of the other teacher preparation books out there by presenting a realistic picture of what you’re walking into. However, if you want to skip right to the practical advice, you may want to start with Chapter 4 and go from there. We recommend reading through as much of the book as you can before you start teaching, because you may not know what you may not know, you know?
As you read, you may find yourself disagreeing with us here and there, and that’s fine. These strategies worked wonders for us, but our goal with this book isn’t to make you into our disciple. We just want you to think through challenging situations before they actually arise. If that means you come to different conclusions than we do, so be it! You’ll still be forming your own strategies and policies, and that’s what’s most important, after all.
This book is our love letter to you. It has been a joy to work together to distill our lives’ work into something that we hope you find useful in your new journey as a first-year teacher. Feel free to e-mail us at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!
Part 1
What They Didn’t Teach You in College
IN THIS PART …
Learn what life is like as a first-year teacher.
Confront society’s preconceived notions about teachers.
Discover what schools
really
think about all those educational theories you had to learn in college.
Explore how things have changed since you were your students’ age.
Chapter 1
What Have You Gotten Yourself Into?
IN THIS CHAPTER
Exploring how teaching compares to other occupations
Understanding the unique demands teachers face
Anticipating the challenges you’ll face before your first day of work
Coping with the chaos of your day-to-day life
Most new teachers are shocked by how different their perception of the teaching profession and teaching itself tend to be. In order to reduce the transitional shock from perception to reality, this chapter focuses on some of the biggest unexpected adjustments that you’ll need to make as you earn your stripes as a teacher. As you read this book, you may find that not every single thing applies to you directly, but you can still find underlying commonalities that affect all teachers. In addition, remember that even though teaching probably won’t be exactly the way you pictured it, by no means should you fear those differences. The little unanticipated variations from the expected are often what make teaching the job that so enticed you in the first place.
Real World versus School World
The world inside the school walls is vastly different from the world outside those walls. However, a haunting, underlying similarity exists between the teaching profession and every other job that you could have taken. These differences make people refer to the “real world” in class, as in the common apologies, “You’ll need to know how to divide decimals in the real world” and “In the real world, people use these spelling words, so unless you want to embarrass yourself, you need to know what they mean.” In this section, we show you how both worlds you’ll be living in compare and contrast.
How teaching is like other jobs
Though teaching has more dissimilarities than parallels with the so-called real world, you’ll find universal laws that hold true in both. Understanding how your new world stacks up to the one you’re used to is a necessary first step in preparing for the teacher’s life.
Your performance will be evaluated based largely on numbers. There are many, many books written about the little emotional things that make an entire career “worth it” (Chicken Soup for the Retiring Biology and Life Sciences Teacher’s Soul–type books), suggesting that a teacher is a good one if they make a difference in just one kid’s life. The reality is that your proficiency in the classroom will be judged according to numbers, just like in most professions. Ultimately, test scores, grade distributions, and standardized assessment scores speak more loudly than anything else when it comes to administrators, especially early in your career. However, if your numbers aren’t quite up to the par they set for you, especially at first, never let that blind you to the good, albeit immeasurable, things that you’re accomplishing in the classroom. Just because you can’t quantify something doesn’t make it any less worthwhile of an objective.
I was blown away the first time my supervisor called my team together and then projected our test scores onto the smartboard. I never gave much thought to how I was stacking up to my colleagues because my school often assigned me students whom other teachers called the “bad kids.” I loved teaching them because they were a challenge, but it meant that my scores weren’t always at the top. I couldn’t have cared less. If my boss wanted to boil my life’s work down to a number with no context then so be it. That didn’t mean I would. The fact that my students were even generating data points meant that I was doing my job. You know in your heart that you’re making a difference — you don’t need a test score to tell you that.
You’ll get both praise and blame that you don’t deserve.
Take it all in stride. The good days and the bad days will eventually offset each other. So, if things look bleak, give it a week or so and the clouds will begin to clear. However, this works both ways. If you’re feeling on top of the world, don’t get too big for your britches. Even the most experienced teacher is bound to wind up in extremely sticky situations, and they always come out of the blue. Always be on the lookout for problems and try to head them off before things get ugly.
Most people don’t want to hear about what you do at work.
Even though everyone’s been in school and can relate to your job, don’t assume that people want to hear about your great lesson plan on teaching condensation to elementary school science students. As much as you may be changing the future and exciting kids about learning, realize that other people’s apathy is nothing personal. In fact, keeping most educational opinions to yourself is usually to your benefit. If prodded, many people will launch into a diatribe about “what’s wrong with education.”
Teaching is an admirable career, full of sacrifice and too often bereft of the reward and recognition it deserves. But be sure that you don’t slip into the mindset that you’re doing society a favor by teaching, and that society should, in turn, pay you back in spades. We know that teaching is one of the few truly humanitarian professions left, but trust us when we say that the rest of the world would rather us not belabor the point.
How teaching is unique
My first job was a corporate job; I was a quality assurance analyst with a corner office. Business suits, elevator music, the whole thing. I can’t possibly overstate the culture shock when I transitioned into teaching physical education. I thought, “How hard will this be? We’ll just have fun and play all day!” And then I stepped foot into the classroom. It was so loud. There were 30 little bodies running around, all of them with their own needs, and they are all screaming. Susie’s feelings got hurt. Johnny just barfed, and eight kids need to go to the bathroom right now. I had a moment where I questioned all of my life’s decisions all at once. My dream of marching into a room of perfect angels eager to learn from me evaporated instantly.
Teaching is undeniably as unique a career as they come, and in many ways, it’s completely, utterly, and shockingly different from other jobs. Most of these differences are practical rather than philosophical, and if we sound like we’re starting to get a little bit too deep into academic speak here, let us dispel that perception with the first stark contrast we make between the real world and the school world:
You don’t get to eat or go to the bathroom when you want. You haven’t lived until you’re forced to eat lunch at 10:05 a.m. or until you’ve sweated out the last ten minutes of a class period, with a dire urge to (ahem) relieve yourself. Biological needs play a bizarre starring role as you get used to teaching. Veteran teachers are so used to this schedule and are so well adapted to it that you can set your clock to the time that they use the restroom (not that you’d ever want to do that, but you get the point).
Do yourself a favor: If at all possible, find out what your schedule will be the summer before you start teaching and govern your life by it. Eat lunch at home when you’ll eat it at school. Practice a little self-control in the bathroom department, and only go at the times allotted by your upcoming schedule. You may consider this preparation to be a little ridiculous, but if you’re not used to such rigidity in your schedule, it may be an unwelcome surprise later.
You’ll be expected to do a lot that has nothing to do with your training.
Even though you’ve spent years preparing for a life of teaching, you’re also going to have to serve as the police. Some schools have a safety advocate, security force, or police presence these days, but, in most cases, the system is miniscule at best. You’ll be expected to police kids as they eat, play, walk in the halls, use the restroom, attend sporting events, attend school-wide assemblies, and so on. In addition, you’ll most likely be asked to participate in a school-based activity, sponsor a club, or coach a sport
even if you have no experience in that club or sport whatsoever.
Flip to
Chapter 16
for more discussion of extracurricular activities.
Your free time is going to take a huge hit. Most teachers use the term 9-to-5 job very contemptuously. They curl their lips and produce spittle when they talk about people who can just leave work at 5 p.m. and not have to grade, plan, and wonder what to do about that weird kid in social studies who keeps licking the textbook. You should expect to give up lots of your own time (and spend lots of your own money), especially if you’re going to make fun and engaging lesson plans. You can find tons of lesson plans in books and online, but you’ll find that none are ever quite right for you. You’ll spend a lot of time tweaking these plans so that they work better for your kids. Plus, don’t forget that you have to master the material before you can hope to teach it — you’re about to find out just how much you really forgot from your own schooling!
Your summers are “work free.”
This difference is no longer true universally, as it once was. We never taught at a “year-round school,” and we’re thankful for it. All that time you spent at school and at home, grading and working yourself to the bone, is rewarded with a little more than two months of vacation. Don’t be surprised, however, that your summers are rarely, if ever, actually vacations at all. Don’t forget that you have to stay certified, and that takes a lot of classes and workshops. Furthermore, you’re not earning a king’s ransom, so most people take extra jobs during the summer.
You actually earn all your pay only during the academic year, so summer is technically an unpaid vacation. Many school systems will take your annual pay and divide it up so that you receive the same pay during the summertime as you did during the school year. However, some systems will offer you a choice. If money management isn’t exactly your strong suit, don’t elect to take larger paychecks that end when the school year does. If you’re given more money, you may end up spending it. On the other hand, if you know yourself well and you’re confident you can set enough aside to make it through the summer without having to bum meals off your friends, you’d be wise to take the larger paychecks that end when the school year does. That way, you can be earning interest on your income that much sooner.
PRACTICAL POTTY TALK
If you’re someone of weak composure, bear with me for a moment. Most teaching books don’t address this issue, but it’s one that most first-year teachers wonder about and are hesitant to address. What if they really need to go to the bathroom, and they can’t wait until the end of class? This topic is actually a very important legal issue. The key point is supervision. You can’t leave your class unsupervised, even for a moment. Therefore, making friends with one of the teachers in a classroom adjacent to yours is essential. If you’re a floating teacher (you change classrooms some or every period of the day), you have more work cut out for you; you’ll have to find a buddy teacher for every classroom you’re in.
If things get dire, give your class a good excuse for why you have to leave the room (the principal asked to meet with you quickly after the period got underway, or you have to deliver a note to another teacher), and ask your buddy teacher to keep an eye on your class while you’re gone. (By the way, make sure that the excuse matches the length of time you expect to be gone.) This practice is applicable for all reasons that you may need to leave the room, even if you’re just going into the hallway to speak with a student you’ve sent out for disciplinary reasons. Don’t shut your door behind you as you leave! This cuts you off from the rest of your students, and anything can happen in your absence. Leave the door open and make it a point to keep looking in on them. Keep this question in mind: “If this were ever brought into a court of law, could I prove that the students were in some way supervised?” If so, you’ll be fine. You’re allowed to go the bathroom if you have to.
Except sometimes it’s not so simple. I used to teach in a school that wouldn’t let you leave students unattended, but neither would they do anything to help you in the face of a personal emergency. Plan A was “you can’t leave your room ever,” and there was no Plan B. Because I was teaching in the gym, a building detached from the main school building, it was impossible to communicate with, let alone get coverage from, another teacher. Even inside the building it was a challenge. The reality struck me when one of my colleagues actually urinated on herself during class because no one would come to her room and monitor her students for five minutes. She was humiliated.
The administrators at the school did nothing to change their policies after The Event. Adults were still not allowed to use the bathroom if they needed to, and no one would respond to requests for coverage. It was up to me to protect myself, so I went to my doctor and asked her to write me a note that basically said, “Please let this grown woman pee when she needs to,” but to make that sound as medically professional as she could. The school had to make a medical accommodation for me at that point, only because the law required it.
Finally, and then I promise we’ll move on from this topic: Look out for your colleagues. When you have a planning period, pop into someone’s classroom and ask whether they need a break. One of my schools had a long (110-minute) instructional period because of lunch shifts, and I can tell you for a fact that there were days near the end of that nearly two-hour stretch that I wished someone had checked on me.
Bearing the Instructor’s Burden
Teaching is a unique profession in that you’re basically isolated from your colleagues from the first minute of the first school day and are expected to learn as you go with little or no help during the day. It’s a difficult chore and a heavy burden to carry, especially when things aren’t going well. You’d think that you could lean on your experience as a student teacher in these times, but you’d be surprised how different your actual teaching experience will be from your time as a student teacher.
Sink or swim!
Have you seen those TV shows where they demonstrate that babies can swim without instruction as soon as they’re born? They toss infants into a swimming pool, and the little ones just swim like tadpoles without a care in the world! That’s what it’s like to teach. You get tossed right into the water, and everybody stands back and watches. “Are they going to make it? They may be in trouble, but let’s just watch what happens. Maybe they’ll pull through after all, and if they don’t, we’ll drag them out and throw somebody else in instead.”
Stop and think about that for a second — it’s actually pretty scary! School systems aren’t interested in making you a good teacher. They expect you to be good based on your college training, without a whole lot of experience under your belt. Even worse, you’re not going to swim very well when you first get tossed in. Teaching your first class based on what you learned in college is like being asked to swim across the Atlantic Ocean with nothing more than those little inflatable armbands. Even if you manage to stay afloat, you’re going to swallow a lot of water along the way.
One of the new teachers we interviewed relayed this story. He was leading his class to the media center for the first time. The class was deemed a “behavior problem” (or more appropriately, a powder keg ready to explode), so the thought of simply walking the group as a whole to the library was a daunting exercise in itself. After they arrived with no calamity to speak of, he sat his students down at the available computers and had, what he considered, a rather successful lesson explaining how to use the school’s electronic and online resources. However, the librarian contacted him the next day, enraged. Evidently, his class was so quiet and focused because they were in the process of stealing pieces of the computer. Of the 30 computers in the lab, 23 were no longer functional, and the librarian held him flatly responsible for not keeping an eye on his kids.
That sort of thing is quite a wake-up call, and it’s the result of a common practice among principals. (By the way, that teacher-principal relationship is a tricky one, so we discuss it more in Chapter 12.) You’d think that as a new teacher with little experience and a lot of learning to do, your administration would remove as many obstacles as they possibly could to ensure that you’ll be as successful as possible. Unfortunately, this probably isn’t going to happen, and it all falls under that sink-or-swim mentality. In their view, putting you in a rough situation is the best thing that they can possibly do. That way, you have “ample opportunity to gain experience.” How generous! Here are the most common adversities you’ll face as a newbie:
You’ll probably have the “problem kids.”
If veteran teachers have any input in the scheduling process, they’ll do everything they can to make sure that they get a well-behaved group of students or classes for the following year, which means you won’t. Before you get too bitter, just remember one thing: They were in your shoes once, and they had to go through the same thing you’re going through. They’re more than content to let you experience the joy and fun of tough classes. Remember that even challenging classes can be transformed using effective discipline tactics, which we describe in
Part 2
.
You won’t have the greatest classroom if you have a classroom at all.
When it comes time to choosing classroom space, veteran teachers will leave you slim pickings. If there are more teachers than available rooms, the new teachers usually draw the short straw and become
floaters,
the stoic nomads armed with only an audiovisual cart (the one that’s so hard to drive because it always swerves to the right when you push it) to hold their meager possessions and stacks of papers to grade.
You won’t get to teach the cool classes.
Don’t forget that you’re not coming into a fresh ecosystem when you start teaching. Most likely, that school has been around for a while, and so have most of the teachers — and they’ve all carved out their little niches. The upper-level courses and electives already have teachers whose names are synonymous with them, so don’t expect to march in and assume leadership of the classes and coursework that you’ve always dreamed of. Even if you have terrific qualifications in a given subject area and are actually more qualified than the current instructor, that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, so eat your humble pie and wait your turn. Something will eventually open up, even though you may have to wait a couple of years (or more).
Don’t let any of this discourage you. Most of the negatives we’ve laid out here are true, in one form or another, in any job that you take. Having to pay your dues is simply the way of the world. Although all these things are frustrating and sometimes overwhelming, most people survive and even have great success in the face of such obstacles. It’s through the struggle that you gain the respect of your coworkers and students alike. Only through the refining fire of the sink-or-swim trial do you gain professional stature and experience.
JACK OR JILL OF ALL TRADES
Pretend for a second that you’re an accountant ready to begin work in a prestigious office. On the morning of your first day, the CEO of the company comes into your office and greets you. “We’re glad to have you on board,” he says. “It’s tough to find a good Certified Public Accountant these days, and we feel pretty lucky to have you on the team.” You grin inwardly, knowing that you excelled in all your studies for just such a moment as this. You’re wanted; you’re needed. And then, he says something baffling. “I know you’re an expert in foreign currencies, exchange rates, and that sort of thing, which is exactly the reason we hired you. No one else can chug those numbers with quite the proficiency you can.” So far so good, but his look is somber. “Here’s the problem. Between the hours of 12 and 2 p.m. each day, we really don’t require your skills, so we’ll need you to so some electrical wiring work around the office. We saw that you took some physics in college, and we’ve got an electrician’s hat for you and everything. Welcome to the office — and can you fix my lamp when you get a chance?”
As ridiculous as that scenario may sound, it happens all the time to teachers. For example, a choir teacher we know had to teach Spanish classes, even though she had just taken a few Spanish classes in college. Even if you have no formal training in a subject, you just may find yourself teaching it! This isn’t such a big deal to elementary school teachers, who teach just about every subject there is, but if you’re a middle school science teacher, don’t be surprised if you’re asked to teach a class or two of language arts! Most state certifications allow a teacher of one subject to teach “out of content area” for a couple of class periods each instructional day.
Facing adverse conditions
Even though first-year teachers have it tough, they’re not the only ones. You’ll share some challenges with all the teachers in your building, rookie or veteran. These common frustrations aren’t only a little annoying — they are actually detrimental to learning. Among all the teachers we interviewed, two common complaints arose time and time again: the lack of supplies/resources available to teachers and the temperature in the school building.
You probably already know that you’re going to have to buy most of the things you’ll need in the classroom. We’re not talking about paper clips and staples or overhead projectors — those items are usually provided by the school system. Supplies for in-class experiments and projects, stickers or awards, and even the constant and pressing need for boxes of tissues will have you constantly reaching into your wallet or purse. Furthermore, your classroom is going to be as boring as a sensory-deprivation tank if you don’t have some colorful, fun, and engaging decorations on the walls. Although your school may have some posters that you’re required to display, the bulk of the decorating will fall to you.
You can offset some of the costs you face. Many elementary schools publish a list of materials that students are required to bring with them on the first day of school. Anything the kids bring from home is one less thing you have to provide. Among the most important items of which you’ll need an endless supply? Boxes of tissues, so make sure that those are on the list and stress those with parents. Once you establish a stockpile, put out a box at a time to help ration its use. That should keep your kids swaddled in tissues until the end of the year. Furthermore, when parents buy tissues, they’re usually softer than the industrial 120-grit sand-paper tissues schools buy in bulk. Why are we focusing so much on facial tissue? You’ll understand in February when all the students in your class are oozing out of all their facial orifices and the office is out of tissues for the rest of the year. High school parents are much less keen on the idea of sending tissues, but Mike motivated his students to bring in boxes by offering small bits of extra credit. (High school students would rob a bank for extra credit.) You may want to try this tactic yourself if you have trouble getting people to pitch in to the tissue stash.
Tissues aside, one year I carefully tracked all of the expenses I incurred as an elementary school teacher, and the final tally surprised me. The total was just north of $1,000, and by that time I was an established teacher who’d already bought most of her decorations and other classroom accoutrements. Some of the expenses came from everyday consumable items, once we’d run through the stockpile purchased by parents or provided by the school, but a good chunk of the expenses came from little things I would buy for my kids throughout the year, like little gifts on holidays (especially Valentine’s Day, the mother of all holidays in elementary school) and supplies I’d need for fun projects as inspiration hit throughout the year.
The second biggest complaint about school conditions is the temperature of the classrooms. Let us set the stage for you using a true tale from Mike’s teaching experience. It’s late October, and mornings have just begun to get chilly. Sweater weather is here at last. As you enter your classroom, you feel the door stick a little bit in its frame. “Hmmm,” you think to yourself. “That’s odd.” The little mystery is soon explained by an agonizingly hot gust of wind that assaults you, literally blowing your hair back as the door swings open. The room is so obscenely hot that the tape you’ve used to hang your posters has warped, sagged, and ultimately surrendered to gravity. All the decorations in your classroom are lying in heaps on the floor, many curled and bent beyond recognition.
You know that learning will be difficult in such an atmosphere. Actually, staying awake will prove just as tricky. How are you going to teach that day in a volcanic cave full of desks? You call the office to report the atmospheric anomaly, hoping that (at the worst) it can be rectified by lunchtime. But alas, there is no quick solution. Something in the heating system is broken, and tracking down its antique replacement will take months in the best-case scenario. Maybe by April, they say, as your eyes boggle out of your head. April? Are they serious? Are we talking about six-months-from-now April, half a year away? You are liquifying even as you hold this conversation, or are you just crying now, struck helpless by the circumstances?
You eye the outside door knowing that just beyond it lies the chilly weather that you dressed for this morning, but you also know that propping open that door is not safe in this day and age. Even the air in the hallway would be a reprieve, but school rules and safety guidelines require that door be shut and locked. You spend months sweating through your clothes every single day, squinting into high velocity, oscillating hot air propelled by an army of fans you purchased, fans that might as well be blow-dryers stuck at the highest heat setting. It is a nightmare. Your kids are miserable, and you actually feel yourself resenting them just a little bit, because they get to leave after 45 minutes but you have to stay here. Deep down, you know this is an unfair and slightly insane reaction, but you feel your sanity melting away, day by day, through the sweat that drips down your forehead and runs down your nose onto the test papers you grade, so that each has noticeable water damage and salt residue that flakes when you brush at it with your hand.
Those students actually have it worse than you. Some of them travel to a classroom a mere 90 feet away from yours, and the heating problem has manifested itself differently there. Your colleague is living in an Arctic horror-scape, a victim of your room usurping their desperately needed warm air. The room is so cold, students complain that it hurts to breathe after a few minutes. The teacher is wearing a ski parka and gloves but still shivers so hard that their body aches.
Whether they be from an oppressive classroom temperature or a debilitating lack of supplies, you’ll have plenty of woes. Is there an upside to all this? Believe it or not, yes. These issues are undeniable, affecting everyone, and, therefore, offer you a chance to speak frankly and honestly to your students about something other than, for example, mitosis. Dealing with these issues and your feelings about them help you to form a bond between you and your students in the same way that you can walk up to anyone on the street and start a conversation about the weather. Allowing them to voice their opinions, to vent frustration, and to cope as a group is an invaluable experience, so don’t miss an opportunity to bond with your students, even about so mundane a topic. This is an essential task when you are cultivating a healthy learning environment. When you build transparent and honest relationships, the benefits are manifold. We will return to this strategy time and time again throughout the book.
Of course, you can also find other adults in the school with whom you can commiserate over your shared plights. However, there are very specific politics wrapped around the relationships you’ll have with your colleagues and administrators. Knowing where to complain, how to voice your concerns, and whom to trust in the faculty lounge are just a few of the skills you’ll need to develop. We focus on how to get along with everyone else in your building in Part 4.
You’re the Adult Now!
When you exit college (or graduate school) with all your training complete, to say that you’re familiar with how the educational system works is an enormous understatement. If teaching is your first career, you’ve been hip-deep in schooling for your entire cognizant life. If you’re entering teaching as a second career, surely the coursework and training you had to undergo for certification purposes was enough to remind you of the joy of taking classes. There’s one big difference now, however: You’re in charge, and things look a lot different from this side of the big desk.
Performing six shows a day
First and foremost, you need to understand your role as the grown-up. Your bosses think that you’re there primarily to teach content and secondarily to provide a classroom atmosphere fertile for learning. Your students, however, know that you’re really there to entertain them and (if you have to) teach them something. You’re the Kevin Hart of Language Arts now.
The bell rings. Boom! You’re on. Go out there and have a great show. Try the joke with the funny voice and manage to squeeze in how, exactly, to diagram a sentence while you’re at it. A little while later, the bell rings again, and you have two or three minutes to compose yourself before the next showtime. The only differences between you and a Vegas entertainer are that you have to perform more often, to a captive audience (instead of people who pay to be there), and you actually have to teach while you’re at it.
The elementary school teachers we interviewed accepted their role of entertainer far more easily than did the secondary teachers. Younger kids need constant pizzazz to keep them alert and on track. Things have to be quick, constantly shifting, vibrantly attention grabbing, and always exciting, but secondary school teachers often fail to realize that older kids want many of the same things. Even during group activities, you’re the center of the students’ attention for the majority of the time they’re in your classroom, and your mood and actions hold sway over everything that happens. Many teachers feel that they’re not paid enough to entertain the kids — and that’s unfortunate. These faculty always seem to be the same group that complains when in-service meetings are boring, or if they feel that they’re being “talked at” rather than actively engaged when they’re not the one in charge. Try to teach your class in a way that would keep you both interested and entertained if you, yourself, were a student.
Does this mean that you need to begin every lesson by jumping through fiery hoops while juggling on a unicycle? No, but we’d pay to see it, especially if you could teach the finer points of the French and Indian War while you did it. You can do all sorts of little things to spice up your lessons, which we discuss in Chapters 9 and 10, but you need to remember that holding your students’ interest is just as much your job as making sure that they pass their quizzes and tests. You’ll grow to see that entertained students and successful students are often one and the same.
Make no mistake about it. Whether you’re a secondary teacher and you have a bunch of distinct shows every day, or you’re an elementary teacher and all those shows blend into one long performance, it’s exhausting and often thankless work. The more involved your lesson plans and the more interactive your activities, the more draining it is. But as your kids figure out that you design your classes first and foremost with them in mind, they’ll grow to trust you, and your relationship will begin to turn from teacher-student into mentor-student, with the ultimate goal of becoming allies in the educational process. Although it’s mentally, physically, and emotionally taxing, developing a strong trust relationship with your students provides benefits that far outweigh the inherent challenges.
Working in Neverland
Remember Neverland, the home of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys? The land where no one grew up and everyone could fly? Well, school will be your own personal Neverland, where only you get older, but each generation of kids stays exactly the same age. (And you’ll swear that they can fly based on their limitless well of energy and enthusiasm.) It’s a land with rules unto itself that don’t apply anywhere else in the world. For example, chewing gum is rarely allowed in Neverland, and in Neverland you have to ask permission before you use the restroom.
Always keep in mind that the rules of Neverland and the rules in the adult world aren’t at all the same. For instance, regardless of how old the students are, most of Neverland’s residents suffer from a severe lack of perspective. Tears flow freely and often within the bounds of this magical land, no matter how old the resident. Each test is the end of the world and causes severe stress and panic. Every emotional or interpersonal crisis can actually make time stand still for those involved. We defy anyone to try to teach the quadratic equation to a student after their boyfriend or girlfriend of six whole months broke up with them just before your algebra class began.
THE SPOTLIGHT’S ON YOU!
If you piled up everything that you’ve discovered, accumulated, and experienced during your student-teaching term, the heap would be considerable. However, the one thing that student teaching doesn’t offer you is a chance to do things from scratch. You were always working within your sponsor teacher’s guidelines, in a room that was already prepared for you, with a plan of action that was already in place.
You’ll feel overwhelmed when you walk into your new job and everything depends on you. We talked to a teacher who arranges student-teaching placements and then follows up after those student teachers find jobs. She happened to walk in on one of her students who’d just been hired as he stood alone, in the dark, in his future classroom. He evidently didn’t hear her enter the room because nothing broke his unblinking gaze as it swept back and forth across the desks piled along the walls and the vast, open floor. As he turned, he looked at her with wide, unblinking eyes and said, “There’s nothing here … nothing. Where do I start?” She had no response other than to comment to herself that perhaps she hadn’t expressed to the teachers the enormity of the task before them.
When you arrive on your first day, there are no rules, lesson plans, seating arrangements, or decorations. The task of putting together a successful school year is truly daunting because it is made up of so many individual composite parts. You may get a feeling of abandonment as you pass from the nurturing embrace of student teaching to the full immersion of professional teaching. Therefore, your best bet is to find allies among your new colleagues as soon as possible so that you feel you still have a support structure in place.
You need to remember one key rule during your visit to this exotic and strange country: You’re only a visitor to Neverland, not a resident yourself. You’re only an ambassador from the adult world, and you’re there to (in some fashion) help these children transition into a world where people get older, time gets faster, and trapping lightning bugs in jars slowly loses its allure. In plain and bold terms, always act your age because you’re the adult, and you can’t have a successful classroom if everyone, including the teacher, acts like a child.
