7 Tips for Surviving Your First Year of Teaching
This one is for the new teachers. The ones who are about to embark on their first year of teaching.
This is what is going to happen- You’re going to read this and think, “Wow! That was so helpful. Thanks Casey! You’re the best person in the whole wide world for sharing your smorgasbord of knowledge with us!”
Okay, I’m exaggerating… but you will probably read this and think that I helped you in some way. But you are WRONG.
Why? Because NOTHING I repeat NOTHING can prepare you for your first year of teaching. Not four years of college, not even nine years of passion for the profession. But I’ll try my best to ease your mind with “7 Tips for Surviving you First Year of Teaching.”
Picture this. Little Miss Earl (my maiden name) skipping off to her first day of class with her Thirty-One lunch box, “Miss Earl” embroidered on the side. I was living my best life. I had my own house, I got a cat, I paid my own bills, I had my first big girl job, and I had my classroom all decorated to perfection. What could possibly go wrong? I thought I had it all together!
“Nothing will ruin your 20s more than thinking you have your life together.”
The first weeks of teaching were great! Metaphorically, it was almost like honeymoon stage in a relationship. Yes! That’s what was! It felt like I was in a relationship with teaching. However, we started to drift apart when I became “that girl” who decided “she didn’t know what she wanted” and kept telling teaching, “It’s not you it’s me.” I decided I wanted to break up. I even cheated on teaching with other career ideas; I even applied to grad school for something completely unrelated to teaching. About three months into teaching I didn’t know how I was going to finish. It was hard, I was lost, I questioned everything I did, and I felt like a failure. I lost my inspiration.
So here are my tips for you in hopes you won’t give up. Because with the way education is going, we need good teachers like you to keep going.
Don’t wait until the second semester to ask for help.
The biggest mistake you can make is to internalize everything and to try and figure everything out on your own. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m really bad at asking for help; I like figuring things out on my own. After all, I studied teaching for four years, I should know this stuff! However, in doing so, I started criticizing everything I was doing. I did that for the first semester because I was on my own, and I needed to figure things out, right? Wrong.
After Christmas break, things got so much better when I made a decision to ask for help and reach out to other people in the profession. Never be afraid to ask for help, ask for more feedback, or borrow other people’s ideas. You will never be a burden to those people; you are not cheating by not coming up with everything from scratch. I wish I would have realized that sooner. If I hadn’t signed a contract I would have surely quit teaching after my first semester. Nevertheless, I waited it out, asked for help, and gave teaching another chance.
2. It is okay to be in survival mode.
Gallagher said this, Smagorinsky said that, Marzano said this, Wong said this, Smekens said that, but Burke told me to do that. (For those of you who don’t know those people- those were authors of methods books that we swore by in the English Education department).
With a plethora of education knowledge stored in my brain’s filing cabinets, I thought I was going to be an awesome teacher right off the bat. I was going to have everything planned out and never go into survival mode- I will NEVER EVER use a word search or a crossword puzzle...because that is lazy. Well folks, I’ll have you know I used a word search just the other day. And occasionally I slapped “silent reading” day on the door because I didn’t know what else to do. And yes, I hear all of you shaking your head a thinking, “that’s why teachers should keep getting paid crap salaries, because your job is SO EASY.” Guess what? I just cyber slapped you. And if that’s not a thing, I just made it one. New teachers- JUST SURVIVE.
You will get better as time goes on. Students would ask me, “Miss Earl! What are we doing tomorrow?” and I would say, “I have no idea.” I was not ashamed that I was just trying to keep my head above water.
3. Don’t take thing so personally.
A student used to come into class every day and say, “I hate this class so much.” I used to get so offended by that. Mind you, it was EVERY day at the beginning of the day, so I would get down on myself right away. Whenever I heard comments like that, I would try to please that kid the next day with the lesson I was teaching. One night I even spent HOURS planning a lesson that I was confident EVERYONE was going to like. And after the lesson was finished that next day I heard, intermitted between the sounds of death metal radiating through that kid’s headphones, “I hate this class so much.”
I decided then that I would stop taking things so personally, and I would stop trying to please everyone because it was never going to happen no matter how I tried. I realized that I needed to teach to the students that wanted to listen, not the students who didn’t. You save a lot of energy that way, AND you will be surprised at the ones who don’t want to listen always come around in the end.
4. Embrace your inner “Mom” voice.
“Because I said so!”
“If all of your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?”
“Don’t use that tone with me!'“
“Don’t make me ask again!”
“I am not going to repeat myself again!”
Yep. Just embrace it. You will sound like your Mother or your Father.
5. It’s okay to be anti-social.
People always debate whether or not you should sit in the teachers’ lounge for lunch. Some say there is so much negativity you should avoid it, and others say you should totally go because that’s where you make friends! I went for my first couple of weeks. I really wasn’t the biggest fan of going. Instead, I liked to take my lunch to just breathe, eat in silence, get some work done, or just take a brain break and scroll social media. I used to think it was a bad thing that I didn’t want to eat with everyone, but then I realized that I just needed that extra break in the day for myself.
Don’t worry, I still made friends! And so will you. Just do what is best for YOU and YOUR sanity. Don’t worry about what other people say you should or shouldn’t do.
6. You will probably cry…a lot.
Buy some tissues. Cry it out. Buy some wine. Watch Parks and Rec to cheer you up.
7. You WILL make a difference, but you won’t know you did until the end of the year.
Because middle school and high school kids are too cool to tell their teachers that anymore.
Most of the time you feel exactly like what the teacher cynics like to call us, “a glorified babysitter.” You will have days where you can’t seem to get your point across, and you will spend more time telling Billy to stop talking and put away his phone than will spend highlighting the importance of literary terms. Then it will show on their tests because they just didn’t care that day. And you spend your minutes thinking about how you can help them see the bigger picture and telling them to make good choices, be kind, walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, and they will just tune you out. You try to make them understand that you care more about the people they become than the scores on their tests, but they don’t believe you when you’re drilling Shakespeare into their heads. But at the end of the year, you will be surprised at what they were listening to, and you get things like this:
“I am so happy you decided to sprinkle your star dust excellence over my class.”
“You’re the closest teacher I’ve ever had to Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.”
“You do a lot to help us all understand, which is spectacular. You focus on making us better people and you make learning fun.”
“The most important thing I learned this year is empathy and how to be a better person.”
“The most important thing I learned this year is love yourself and that we are all beautiful.”
“The most important thing I learned this year is the life lessons you taught us and how to be a better person.”
“Thank you for putting up with me.”
As my first year came to an end, I could look back and laugh at all the ridiculous things I did or said in class. In the beginning there was minimal laughter- just tears. People always warn you about your first year being hard, but it’s because no person (or teacher to be more specific) ever goes through the same experience. So it is impossible to give advice that will work for everyone. Different students, different lessons, different colleagues, different administrators, different rooms, different everything. So pretty much this entire blog was useless...
BUT I’m hoping that if you take away one thing, it is that you CAN and you WILL survive.
