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
2. Where Have All The Good Teachers Gone?
3. The Best Time To

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

What a wild week this has been! I’m surprised by how much even going over these classroom management basics on here has impacted my teaching. When I preach this stuff, I sort of have to force myself to follow through. I’ve been discussing this stuff with a couple of friends this week, and just in case one of them walks into my classroom, I want to make sure they see the same stuff!

So if you’ve been following along, you are coming to a realization of just how important classroom management is to your overall effectiveness as a teacher.

I know that the week…

Becky writes:

Joel ~ Thank you so much for your article on hope. I was sitting here staring at a stack of papers that need to be graded, wondering how much longer I can take the stress that is piling up on me. I am in the middle of KTIP (Kentucky Teacher Intern Program–for new teachers), and the extra work that is involved with it is about to push me over the edge. I need to step back and remember why I am doing all this. It is so easy to get distracted by all the meetings and never-ending to-do list.

@Becky – I have to remind myself so much of the time. I’ve heard it said that often the…

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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If you have ever been in a typical band or orchestra room at the beginning or end of class, you know how utterly chaotic it can get. Kids throwing music into their folders, quickly rushing to take off reeds, shoving horns into cases, and running out the door to get to the next class. Then one inevitably comes running back in because he forgot to take off his neckstrap or loosen his bow or whatever.

Then the next class comes in. Excited to see each other, talking, rushing to take their instruments out, soak their reeds, prepare music, get set up, and the list goes on. Every day, someone feels it is necessary to tell me they forgot their instrument…

I recently wrote the most-commented article on this site to date about the number of hours teachers work and comparing those to standard business world people. As I write this one, I’m sure it will stir up just as many responses, though many of them will surely be in disagreement with me. Just keep reading, and tell me where I’m wrong at the end!

One of the comments to that article said something to the effect that “nobody works harder than teachers do!”

While I agree with the sentiment, I think it’s possible for our own passion to cloud our word choice at times.

Comments continue coming in about that article, and I saw an email right before I went…

I got a comment on my article Valid Reasons Teachers Quit tonight:

I am up past my usual time and I just decided to go on the web. I came across this. I have been teaching for seventeen years. Maybe you can help. Every morning I dread the thought of going to my job. This has been the worst year ever. I don’t have the desire to ever teach another child. Last year a child brought a knife to school-told his friends he was going to kill me. This year I seem to have the class from hell.

I love to teach-but not children any longer. I am sitting here practically in tears bbecause I feel as though I am…

April is already shaping up to be a record-setting month for So You Want To Teach? We are well on our way to seeing 16,000 visitors or more this month. I am way behind on emails. Please forgive me! I am way behind on comments. I am way behind on reading other blogs. UIL is this Thursday. After that, things begin to resume some remote semblance or normalcy. Please don’t expect me to begin catching up until Friday.

The comments are taking off on here! I want to consider starting up a message forum and really transforming this site into a wealth of knowledge for teachers. I especially want to help out my new and prospective teacher buddies. According to…

This blog has brought some exciting and unexpected things into my life. In this article, I’ll discuss some of the biggest surprises that have come about as a result of this.

A brief background
It was about a year ago that I first began to really get into blogging. I knew of blogs and actually had a few on livejournal and myspace for a few years. I was vaguely aware of RSS back in 2002 when it first came on the scene and began to gain some popularity. I just had never really gotten into the whole blogging thing.

I began reading blogs some and started learning. I was inspired. But I still never ventured into the “edublogosphere.” In…

On Sunday, we looked back at some of The Loneliest Articles of 2007, today, we’ll go to the other extreme and look at the busiest articles of 2007. 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 15 most commented articles.

1. 148th Carnival of Education December 5th, 2007 (9 comments by 9 authors, 4 trackbacks) (13)
2. The State of the Blog: 08/01/07 August 1st, 2007 (11 comments by 11 authors) (11)
3. 5 Surefire Tips For Handling Misbehavior September 12th, 2007 (8 comments by 7 authors) (7)
4. The Purpose Of A Personal Mission Statement July 26th,

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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 love reading. I don’t do it nearly enough, but I still do love it so. I find that many people don’t read a single book after they graduate from high school.

As teachers, we are also supposed to be lifelong learners. We should be desperate to learn about more and more stuff.

I find that as I read more books, especially nonfiction books, I learn more and am able to come to the place of deeper peace with myself. As I learn more about the world, I also learn more about myself. Though personal development books challenge my ideas about the world, they also challenge me to grow and become a better person.

I generally don’t read much education…

I touched on this topic before in Deepen Your Relationships With Friends, but I want to get even more involved here. I want to look at specific ways that you can collaborate with coworkers.

More experienced teachers
These people are the lifeblood of education. We’ve all had at least a small handful of teachers who we had in school whom everyone KNEW were older than the school building, but was afraid to say it. We all know the type. But they truly love teaching. They can imagine nothing else they would do with their lives!

These are the people you need to hook up with. Not only can they be unvaluable sources of free information, but they also generally…

Wow. I love my students. I am amazed that I haven’t written more on my blog about this fact. As I search through my blog, I have come to the realization that I probably come across as some heartless disciplinarian who expects nothing more from his students than that they be quiet all the time.

This is about as far from the truth as you can get. In fact, I love my students very much. I came to the determination three years ago that classroom management was a key element of demonstrating my love to them. You see, when we allow them to waste their education, we are showing unconcern for them rather than courtesy. One of my key scriptures…

We now begin our fourth week of 25 Tips For Less Stress. I have thoroughly enjoyed writing these articles as they have helped me to really focus on some of the routines that I take for granted in my life. When I have been tempted to relax on some of them, I have reread my own writings and been once again inspired to stick it out. This week, we begin focusing on relationships.

Today we’ll begin with the most important relationships of all: family members.

Family disagreements will carry over into every aspect of what we do in life. If you fight with your spouse in the morning before work, one way or another you will take it out on…

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…

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…

Yesterday, we began decluttering our desk. Today, we will declutter our desktop.

One of the things that drives me crazy is when I install a new program and it leaves all sorts of icons on my desktop. It also drives me crazy when I have all sorts of popup notifications in my Windows taskbar telling me everything that I don’t need to know. These are nonurgent situations presenting themselves as though they were urgent. It disrupts my life and it’s something that I finally decided to put a stop to.

I am not going to attempt to reinvent the wheel on this one. I have found some great articles that thoroughly go through processes for getting things organized. What I…

I have written about having a clear desk before in passing, but here is a little bit about why to do it as well as how to do it. This is a real picture of my half of the office at work.

Imagine coming to work each morning and having a nice, calm, clear workspace. Do you think it would help jump start your work day? I know for me, I am able to get to work, sit down in my (clearly uncomfortable) chair, and relax.

We’ve all read the sign atop a messy desk: “A Clean Desk Is The Sign of a Diseased Mind.“ That is an excuse given by people who don’t want to bother with coming up…

This is perhaps my most favorite tip of them all! I haven’t regularly watched television since I was in 11th grade, but I have watched quite a bit of it. When I read “The 4-Hour Workweek,” Timothy Ferriss suggests a low-information diet. His theory is that if you simply ask people “what’s new in the world,” you will find out about most news. He also points out that most news that comes across as events are unfolding is either incomplete or totally inaccurate. I tend to agree.

So I have made the decision this year to completely unplug my television. I will actually get rid of it soon, I’m just not sure what I’m going to do with it. It’d…