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 Things I Wish I Knew As A First Year Teacher. That list turned into a series and quickly became one of the most popular subjects of discussion on So You Want To Teach?

As this is a subject that resonates with many of my readers, I felt like reaching out to the blogging community and asking for some of your suggestions. If you could come up with a list of 10 things that would have made your first year of teaching (or the first three months if this is your first year), what would they be? I encourage you to contact me and let me know. I am going to post these responses throughout the month of November. If you have a blog and would like me to link to it, feel free to include that info as well!

I believe this sort of thing is one of the reasons that Liz Strauss named me as a Successful and Outstanding Blogger (SOB). For a list of these other blogs, and to celebrate her Successful-Blog‘s 3rd birthday, I invite you to join the birthday party and check out some of the other amazing blogs there!

Joel Wagner

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.