This is a guest post by Pat Hensley from the blog Successful Teaching. As we gear up for the upcoming school year, So You Want To Teach? is featuring articles about making this school year the best year ever.

I have been teaching about 30 years now and I still love teaching! I have taught all grade levels including the university level and I still feel the same way. After teaching special education classes for 28 years in public schools, I now teach teachers getting their master’s degree in special education and write a blog called Successful Teaching. I really appreciate Joel for giving me the opportunity to be a guest writer on his blog.

Of course, at the beginning of the year,…

Are you at the bottom of a pit? Maybe you’re in a place you never thought you would be. Or you never thought you’d be there again. I can’t count the number of times I’ve fallen into a bad habit in teaching. I allow myself to get bogged down with paperwork instead of taking care of it right away. Students ask me questions at the beginning of class and I forget the six magic words that liberate me: “I’m not answering questions right now.”

Oh, you’ve done it too…

Positive changes come and go like the wind most of the time. How do we stick it out and truly persevere? If you know the answer to this question, write a…

So here’s the situation:

You’ve been teaching for quite a while. You’ve pretty much gotten a handle on classroom management, paperwork, classroom rules, and any number of the other day-to-day tasks we encounter. But how many of these teaching vices do you struggle with? I know I’m not guiltless in these areas. In fact, I’ve had run-ins with most of these. Not all of them, of course.

1. Luxuria (extravagance or lust)
   While most people think of lust in a sexual kind of way, in the original context, it essentially meant excessive love of others. Even so, some teachers take this one quite literally and end up losing their jobs over abusive relationships with their students.
2. Gula (gluttony)

…

If this is your first time visiting this site, or even if you’ve been reading for a while, there are undoubtedly some articles that you’ve missed along the journey. As I have been working a lot on organizing the site lately, it has come to my attention that there are over 400 posts on the site. This can be kind of daunting for a new reader to say the least.

These are some of my favorite articles and series that I’ve written on the site. If you’ve read these, maybe you could check in and respond to a comment or two!

1. Questions That Will Save Your Career
   • How Do I Keep My Students Quiet? (8 Things That Work

…

Nothing in the classroom is worth added stress in your life. Nothing.

I know so many band directors (and other teachers as well, but mostly band directors) who get so incredibly worked up over their jobs that they lose their health, marriage, youthful physique, energy, or alienate their own children. Why? Because of their own selfish pride.

Just because nothing catastrophic happens this year doesn’t mean that nothing will. Stress can be cumulative in your life and may be building up and festering over a period of a handful of years.

The best solution is to stop. Now.

How do we avoid stress?
I have written at great length about this in the past, so instead of…

As we begin the summer vacation, I am looking back on what went really well this year, what didn’t work so well, and what needs to change for next year. Below are some of the positives about this year:

• Remaining calm – Despite circumstances this year, with the other band director having a stroke and all, I was able to stay calm most of the time. I lost my temper a few times, but it was nothing compared to my previous years of teaching. A lot of this comes from stress reduction measures I put into place, as well as growing up.
• Doing my job without complaining - I complained a bit on here and to friends, but never

…

By the way, yesterday’s article about quitting? Not true. April Fools. Thanks for all the wonderful comments. And I’m sure most of my regulars figured it out. But, as Waski pointed out:

The things [I] describe do turn many good teachers off on teaching. With some of the silliness I’m presented with, I wonder at times why I bother putting up with it. Of course, most jobs have the silliness and ridiculous paperwork in one form or another.

I love teaching. As Betty points out, teaching is so much a part of me. No matter if I leave the “education profession” or not, I will remain a teacher and will always find myself teaching in some capacity or another.

I…

DISCLAIMER: Please read all of the comments and this article before taking this things too seriously. The reasons given in here are real concerns that I have, but they are definitely outweighed by a number of much more positive elements of teaching.

For a more serious look at the situation, please read 9 Reasons To Quit Teaching (And 10 Reasons To Stick).

I have been an advocate for teaching and getting new blood into the teaching pool since I started my blog. I love teaching. But I can’t see myself as a teacher much beyond this school year. At least in the traditional sense of the word.

So I give up. I am quitting my teaching job after this year….

I realized some things today

• There will never be enough time to do everything I want to do
• There will never be enough money to do everything I want to do
• There will never be enough people to do everything I want to do
• The music will never sound good enough
• Kids will continue to fail their classes, no matter how important I tell them that passing is
• Parents will never be happy enough with everything I do in the classroom
• I will never be caught up on paperwork

But ya know what else I realized?
That’s part of the enjoyment of the process. If I didn’t have anything to do, I wouldn’t be necessary. Meaningless tasks…

Even if you ignore the majority of this article, check out the last sentence.

I am absolutely loving school since coming back from Christmas Break. Even so, I am beginning to get burned out. If you want to know why, go read this. He’s still not back yet and it’s all but certain that he will not be coming back next week either. Still no clue when I can expect him.I wrote an email to my principal today, some edited excerpts follow:

I love teaching and I love rehearsing the bands, but I am very tired. The students suffer as a result. More than anything else, that is what breaks my heart about the whole situation.
It’s not that…

I wrote a couple of days ago about a plan to reduce the amount of papers that you take home. Preferably, that number will approach zero as your systems get refined. That is NOT the focus of this entry. The goal here is to truly liberate you from your job.

The story goes:

A senior monk and a junior monk were traveling together. At one point, they came to a river with a strong current. As the monks were preparing to cross the river, they saw a very young and beautiful woman also attempting to cross. The young woman asked if they could help her.

The senior monk carried this woman on his shoulder, forded the river and let her…

I got an email from one of our secretaries yesterday asking me to call one of the other administrative assistants. The message left no indication of why I should call her. I have not yet called her and I don’t intend to do so. I have a problem with phone calls.

In a world where email has become a standard of communication at work, phone calls are a mere inconvenience

Phone calls pose as important interruptions
Often they are unimportant or at the very least delayable. At the worst, they are totally unimportant. Phone calls allow someone else to control our environment.

I don’t answer the phone during class
I made the decision my third year of teaching to never…

One of the biggest drains on my energy is paper clutter. One of the biggest drains on the environment is trash. For these reasons, I try to do everything I can digitally rather than with paper.

I am so used to having so much paperwork, that I forget what it would be like without it. I went to school to be a band director, not a clerical assistant, but there are entire days where all I do is office work while another director teaches my class. Fundraising, returned progress reports, ARD forms, absence notes, hall passes, schedule change forms, field trip requests, receipts, deposit slips, you name it, I have it. Oh yeah, the students also occasionally turn work in…

Recent housekeeping issues

• I have decluttered my sidebar much more
• Moved a lot of stuff to the footer
• I added a graphical link in the “Features” to 25 Tips For Less Stress
• I added a question mark logo thing at the top of each article, which links here
• I added a favicon that should be showing up in the address bar
• I moved all of the Blogroll links to a separate page
• I added links to a few Social Bookmarking sites onto each post
• I added tags and a tag cloud at the top of the site

Many of these things happened last weekend. Just in time…

This has been a crazy week for So You Want To…

We now have our Desk and Desktop under control. But how do we keep them under control? Better yet, how do we keep from having too much stuff coming into our lives that we allow to become clutter?

Email Inbox
Something that many teachers can’t seem to figure out is how to archive their old emails. Instead, they just leave them all in the inbox. I was at an inservice and the presenter apologized to one of the other teachers because she had been gone for a few days and overlooked the teacher’s email because it got lost in the shuffle. She didn’t get around to it until two weeks later. That’s just plain inexcusable! So how do we avoid…

Download the entire series in e-book format here

This school year has been remarkably stress-free for me. As a middle school band director working with the non-varsity group, this is unheard of. I have come up with a list of 25 things I have done that have helped to make this happen. During the month of October, the busiest month of the year for people involved with Texas marching bands, I am going to spend each weekday writing very briefly on one of these tips. The articles will be much shorter than my normal articles, but they will be consistent.

1. Drink Water
2. Wake Up Earlier
3. Eliminate Junk Food
4. Increase Healthy Foods
5. Kill Your TV
6. Declutter Your Desk
7. Declutter

…

Think of the many reasons you have to quit.

1. Bad students
2. Bad administrators
3. Bad curriculum
4. Too much paperwork
5. Too much negativity
6. Too much responsibility
7. Not enough time
8. Not enough credit
9. Not enough PAY

Face it, you are not as good of a teacher as you could be. You’re not living up to your potential. Nobody is.

Where am I?
Seth Godin says that you are in The Dip (What’s The Dip?). This is that place where it feels like nothing you do matters. Things were going so well until you hit The Dip. It’s when you get to that point where you realize that indeed, the honeymoon is over. When the tide has turned and things are…

This article is part 4 of the series Questions That Will Save Your Career. Please read the other articles in the series.

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?

What do you do to keep students learning?
We have come to the central part of why we entered into the educational field. Sometimes amidst the classroom management issues, paperwork, extracurricular assignments, professional development, and all sorts of other considerations, we can easily lose sight…