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 Pat Hensley, the author of Successful Teaching.

1. Knowing how to set up a grade book and weighing different assignments
2. Have a support system
3. Meeting with other new teachers and sharing day to day problems
4. Technology (computers in the classroom didn’t exist back then)
5. Constructive criticism from someone who actually taught in my subject area
6. Real textbooks (I had to dig mine out of the textbook dumpster at the end of the year for the next school year)
7. Reading other teacher’s blogs (if they existed back then)
8. Professional development in my subject area instead of general PD that was pretty useless
9. A mentor teacher
10. A smartboard/promethean board (these didn’t exist when I started teaching either)

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.