“You’ll understand when you’re older.”
We tell that to our students, and they don’t like. We hear it when we start out in the teaching world and we don’t like. I remember an experienced band director told me once that he would tell me how to be a better teacher if he knew. He just knew that experience would help me get better. That frustrated me to no end.
I’m a step-by-step guy (if you haven’t noticed by reading other articles on this blog). “Just figure it out” is annoying to me. The way I like to figure things out is to look up the answers and work from there. “Experience is the best teacher” didn’t quite do that for …
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I have written extensively in the past about classroom management and I admit I have glossed over some things while belaboring other points way beyond the point of exhaustion. Below are a few of the common classroom management pieces of advice and a handful of simple tricks to use in effort to make those things happen. Try one or two and see if things become easier…
- Work on your pacing
- Slow down your rate of speech; kids don’t comprehend information as fast as we do
- Be silent more often; silence allows kids to reflect more on what has been said
- Communicate urgency without getting frantic
- Be in control of what you say and how you say it
- Don’t argue with
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Disillusionment is common to most of us involved in the teaching profession. We all deal with it at one point or another. Here’s the general path many of us take:
- You major in education because you want to change the world
- You realize that in order to teach, you need a find a job
- You go through disappointing interview after disappointing interview and are told if you had more experience, you would be perfect for the job
- You get frustrated that the only way to get experience is to get the job they won’t give you because you don’t have experience
- Some school district that was not your first choice offers you a chance…finally
- You take the job because it
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I am in my 11th year of teaching now. Where did the time go? One of the top search results that sends people to this blog is “First Year Teacher” so I thought that the beginning of a new school year would be a great time for something like this. I’m sure there are tons of other things that first year teachers should know, but here are a handful of tips.
- Persevere
- Learn from the wisdom of others
- Avoid gossip
- Work diligently
- Leave room for a personal life
- Live on less than you earn
- Students are a reflection of their parents
- Students are a reflection of their teacher
- Persistent problems are usually caused by something you are doing/allowing/omitting/forgetting
- Find a
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How is this year going to be different from every other year you’ve taught before? Do you have a specific plan to ensure that it will be? Here’s a simple suggestion that I aim to implement in my own teaching this year. Ready?
Plan
Each Sunday, I am going to think about what has happened in recent weeks and identify one weak area that needs to be addressed. It doesn’t have to be the biggest problem area. In fact, sometimes targeting a seemingly insignificant problem that I know I can rectify helps me gain confidence to attack the bigger, more ominous ones later on. Perhaps I can tackle one specific element of a larger problem area. The whole “one bite …
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