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Questions That Will Save Your Career

This article features links to other articles in a series called “Questions That Will Save Your Career.” These are all considerations that I have made as a teacher that helped me stick to it and survive in the business when I was first starting out.

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As I have mentioned before, my priorities as a first year teacher were a little bit off. It wasn’t until the end of my second year before I began to really “get it.” I still don’t get it, but I have begun to. What I learned in the last two and a half months of that second school year was that I needed to ask questions. But not just any questions. Over time, I have learned that a lot of the questions I asked were unfruitful or misguided. But I did do some things right. Below are some of the best questions that you can ask more experienced teachers, along with my answers to them.

  1. How Do I Keep My Students Quiet?
  2. How Do I Keep My Students Engaged?
  3. How Do I Keep My Students Interested?
  4. How Do I Keep My Students Learning?
  5. How Do I Keep My Students Away From Me?
  6. How Do I Keep My School Administration Happy?
  7. How Do I Keep My Sanity?

    And five years later, I revisited these concepts and added knowledge that I have gained through my ten years of teaching experience.

  8. 10 Years of Teaching: How Do I Keep My Students Quiet?
  9. 10 Years of Teaching: How Do I Keep My Students Engaged?
  10. 10 Years of Teaching: How Do I Keep My Students Interested?
  11. 10 Years of Teaching: How Do I Keep My Students Learning?
  12. 10 Years of Teaching: How Do I Keep My Students Away From Me?
  13. 10 Years of Teaching: How Do I Keep My School Administration Happy?
  14. 10 Years of Teaching: How Do I Keep My Sanity?

Joel Wagner (@sywtt) began teaching band in 2002. Though he had a lot of information, his classes were out of control. He found himself tired, frustrated, disrespected by students, lonely, and on the brink of quitting. He had had enough. He resigned from his school district right before spring break of his second year and made it his personal mission to learn to be a great teacher. So You Want To Teach? is the ongoing story of that quest for educational excellence.

Joel Wagner
Joel Wagner (<strong><a href="http://www.twitter.com/sywtt">@sywtt</a></strong>) began teaching band in 2002. Though he had a lot of information, his classes were out of control. He found himself tired, frustrated, disrespected by students, lonely, and on the brink of quitting. He had had enough. He resigned from his school district right before spring break of his second year and made it his personal mission to learn to be a great teacher. <strong><a href="http://www.soyouwanttoteach.com/">So You Want To Teach?</a></strong> is the ongoing story of that quest for educational excellence.
http://www.SoYouWantToTeach.com

One thought on “Questions That Will Save Your Career

  1. Joel —
    This is a wonderful site. Some of the topics you talk about are the nitty-gritty daily problems that are rarely discussed. I also like that you are a teacher of a special subject, not a “classroom teacher.” This perspective is so often ignored in the teaching literature. We have special constraints or situations that the traditional solutions just don’t address. You teach 30 minute lessons. I’d love for you to start a section for those teachers of special subjects, like art, music, PE, library, computers, etc. We need a place to talk about our special situations.

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