Do you hate your job? I just finished my third week of school and am excited about how much fun my job will be this year. It’s super exciting. I remember back when I was a first year teacher, though. It wasn’t quite like this. This was underscored this week when a couple of anonymous readers (disgruntled and hey) left the following comments:

It’s interesting reading all these comments and I was searching the internet for other jobs I could do if I wasn’t a teacher.. My story is the opposite. I have a great bunch of students and a really supportive (mostly) group of parents also. I am disgruntled by the workload and also extra things that end up taking…

This is an article in the Total Teacher Transformation series. Click here for a complete table of contents.

I took the day off from blogging yesterday because it was Mother’s Day and I play in a mariachi. If you don’t know what that means, I started playing serenatas (Mother’s Day Serenades) at 6pm Saturday afternoon, wrapped up a little after 8am Sunday morning, then played for another 4 hours Sunday afternoon. We played three songs 40 different times, and also had a one-hour gig in somewhere along the way. With a church service thrown in on Sunday morning for good measure, it probably goes without saying that I was exhausted yesterday when we finished up. But now I’m back and ready to go!

Be…

This is an article in the Total Teacher Transformation series. Click here for a complete table of contents.

Congratulations
First of all, I want to congratulate you on taking the first step of this journey toward becoming a great teacher! I can’t even begin to describe for you the exciting possibilities that await you as you move through these lessons and begin to come over to the other side. If your experiences are anything like mine as I went through this process five years ago, you will not believe that you used to have classes the way you currently do. If you follow the advice here, I can virtually guarantee you a completely different classroom environment before this month is out.

To…

On Wednesday, we looked back at some of The Loneliest Articles of 2008, today, we’ll go to the other extreme and look at the busiest articles of 2008. These are the articles that generated the most comments. I’ve gone through the articles and found those that received the most comments. After boiling down that list, I have come up with the 20 most commented articles.

1. Teaching: Part Time Job At Full Pay Wages???? July 2nd, 2008 (28 comments by 26 authors) (28)
2. Double Your FeedBurner RSS Numbers Overnight January 27th, 2008 (13 comments by 10 authors, 14 trackbacks) (27)
3. The First Ever Music Education Blog Carnival July 1st, 2008 (12 comments by 11 authors, 8 trackbacks) (20)
4. 152nd

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November is Reader Appreciation Month at So You Want To Teach? This year’s focus is First Year Teaching Tips. There’s still room if you want to participate! Contact me and let me know your answer to this question:

What are some things you wish you had known before you started your first year of teaching?

Today’s response is from Clix, the author of Epic Adventures Are Often Uncomfortable.

Things I wish I knew when I was a first-year teacher:

1. Backward Design – Reviewing the standards and keeping them in mind as I plan my units and my lessons helps me to clarify for the students what they need to learn.
2. Each year will continue to get better (at

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November is Reader Appreciation Month at So You Want To Teach? This year’s focus is First Year Teaching Tips. There’s still room if you want to participate! Contact me and let me know your answer to this question:

What are some things you wish you had known before you started your first year of teaching?

Today’s response is from Scribbler, the author of Scribbler’s Den.

This has been a great exercise. I have so much to write about now!

1. A school’s focus on student results and grades is not necessarily a focus on their education. You should focus on their education.
2. The structure of the school year into units, terms and semesters mean the years will pass by

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November is Reader Appreciation Month at So You Want To Teach? This year’s focus is First Year Teaching Tips. There’s still room if you want to participate! Contact me and let me know your answer to this question:

What are some things you wish you had known before you started your first year of teaching?

Today’s response is from Doug Johnson, the author of the wildly popular Blue Skunk Blog. Since he already posted his top 10 list on his own blog, I’ll go ahead and send you over there so you can see his first year teaching picture. He’s a brave man!

This is in response to (a very flattering) request by Joel on his So…

Thanksgiving is a holiday for remembering what we have and giving thanks to our God for His blessings. I like to spend the months of November and December reaching out and giving. I practice giving as a regular habit throughout much of my life, but I specifically focus in these two months on giving back to my blogging community.

Last year I highlighted a number of readers with Reader Appreciation Month. At the end, I did some great summaries:

• 50 Classroom Management Tips I Have Learned This Month
• 47 Blogs That My Readers Are Reading
• Top 5 Character Traits Of Great Teachers
• 50 Reasons To Love Your Job As A Teacher

I recently created a list of 10…

As my series of 10 Things I Wish I Knew As A First Year Teacher comes to a close, I want to point out that the world has changed dramatically over the last 7 years since I began teaching. As an educator, the primary advantage in the tremendous growth of the Internet would be the incredible EduBlogs that have sprung up.

As someone who is quite technologically sophisticated, the presence of this many blogs would have been tremendously helpful for me back then. The problem is that most of the people out there aren’t quite as technologically saavy as I am. So what is an aspiring young educator to do?

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit. Honestly, there…

One of the greatest challenges that I had as a first year teacher was with classroom management. I’ve mentioned that a number of times before and I think most first year teachers go through that.

As with most, I noticed that I had some days where the kids were good, and others where they were bad. It was just so unpredictible. But why?

What made those days so unpredictible?
I honestly think it was a combination of things. But the most important factor in the behavior of the kids had to do with how much dead time they had. How much time they were unoccupied and had to find something to do to keep themselves occupied.

How…

Blogging makes me a better teacher. It’s clearly not the only thing that makes me a better teacher, but it is a tremendous benefit.

This is the second installment in my series on 10 Things I Wish I Knew As A First Year Teacher.

I have previously written on this subject back in January (8 Ways Blogging Makes Me A Better Teacher). At the time, I was in the midst of dealing with a medical emergency. The other band director I work with had a stroke in December and was actually out for over three months. That was back when I had 146 blog subscribers, by the way. Currently I the blog is approaching 450.

The benefits for me about blogging…

When I first started out teaching, I desperately wanted the kids to like me. To this end, I ended up letting my classes get out of control. A handful of things contributed to this:

• Concerning myself with every matter that was brought to my attention
• Allowing kids to mesbehave
• Trying to get the kids to like me
• Yelling at kids
• Arguing with them

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Pat, over at Successful Teaching, recently tagged me in her blog challenge. She suggested that I write an article about the single most important piece of advice I would give a new teacher.

It’s odd that she would write that, as it has been something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. So much so, in fact, that my list goes beyond one. Each remaining day this month, I plan to elaborate on each of these subjects, but the list for now will suffice.

1. Get a handle on classroom management early
2. Start a blog now!
3. Establish a small circle of teacher friends
4. Make efforts to reach every student
5. Pacing
6. Establish clear, concise, comprehensive classroom rules
7. Maintain

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Then hop on over to Learn Me Good and buy a copy of his book. It is undoubtedly one of the funniest books I’ve read since becoming a teacher.

I read it on Fridays in the fall while I was monitoring our school-wide detention. I keep the kids absolutely silent during detention, and that’s hard to do while you’re reading about 3rd graders named Plakton, crazy antisocial ex-coworkers, Star Trek jokes, and TAKS tutorials.

The book documents the struggles of a first year teacher as he makes the transition from the business world to the education world.

If you can’t afford the price of the book, then his latest offer to email you a copy of the book might be…

We’ve all been there. The beginning of the first year of teaching can be daunting, to say the least. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. First year horror stories abound. The number of teachers who quit after the first year or two of teaching matches or exceeds the number of teachers who stick with the profession.

My theory is that teachers leave the biz for lack of knowledge. College only can do so much in preparation. We hear of how much better student teaching was back in the day than it is now, and how poorly prepared prospective educators are these days. There may be validity in that, but lamenting these things doesn’t solve…

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

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