Friday, February 1, 2013

A Letter to First-Year Teachers

It's a school day, so I feel like I should be helping someone out. It's what I do. But we have a snowday today, so instead of helping out students, I'm going to attempt to help out those first-year teachers out there by offering sage advice dunked in sarcasm sauce and topped with my favorite sentence enhancers.

*ahem*

Dear New Teacher,

You are wonderful. You are amazing. You are a saint. Thank you for what you do.

You won't hear those words enough, so I thought I'd start out with that.

My first year of teaching was pretty much horrendous. I think you can probably expect that. There were many things that were simply awful that were also out of my control, but I contributed to my own mess of a year. Let me share with you some of the things I did wrong, so you can learn from my mistakes.
  • I never bothered to ask for help. I was terrified that asking for help would be a sign of weakness, a show of incompetance. I didn't realize that doing something incorrectly was ultimately much worse than asking for help.
  • I did not manage my time wisely. I waited to make copies until right before I needed them, I spent my prep period doing projects that didn't need done until later rather than the things that should have been taken care of right away.
  • I gave way too much homework, more than I could ever keep up with for grading, because I thought that was what good teachers did.
  • I created all of my own PowerPoints, worksheets, tests, etc. because I didn't want to take "the easy way out." 
  • I was very intimidated by my coworkers (who I found out too late were wonderful, intelligent, friendly people) and I never felt confident enough to strike up a conversation. It didn't help that I was only twenty-two, I lived forty miles away, I wasn't married, and I still lived in my parents' basement. They were adults. I felt like a student eating lunch with them.
  • I didn't get nearly enough sleep.
  • I planned a wedding.
  • I never really sat down and planned my year long-term. I just planned day-by-day. BIG MISTAKE.
  • I didn't plan bell to bell.
  • I didn't develop a good relationship with my students in the classroom.
That's a lot of mistakes, and I'm sure there were plenty more. The good news is that all of these have pretty simple fixes, and you can avoid a lot of heartache by doing some pretty simple things. Allow me to offer some expletives-laden advice. (There are expletives because I am a potty mouth hugely passionate about this stuff.)
  • GOLDEN RULE OF TEACHING: ASK FOR HELP. This is not a job you can do on your own without going completely insane. Most teachers share a common personality trait in that they are happy to help people. It goes with the trade. Most of your coworkers will be happy to help you out (and you'll quickly discover the ones that don't want to help, in which case you should spit in their coffee and hide their mail). Find those experienced teachers and ask for help! They've got all kinds of neat little tricks up their cardigan sleeves for making your life in the classroom bearable, or maybe even pleasant.
  • Time-management, for the love of everything good and holy. Figure out your shit before you start it! Prioritize and get stuff done. Do everything you need to complete before tomorrow, and then you can do stuff that's more long-term. If you have to (and I do, so no shame) make a To-Do list and number the items by priority. Make your copies at least the day before, because I guarantee that the morning you need to make fifty copies of an exam and first period starts in ten minutes will be the morning that every asshole out there is making nine hundred copies of the parts of a flower worksheet, front and back. Either that or the copier will be broken. You know, all that Murphy's Law shit.
  • Bad teachers ignore their students needs and focus on their own. Mediocre teachers give busy work to meet their own needs that may or may not be what the student needs. Good teachers give a lot of homework in the hopes that en masse activities will meet the students' needs. Great teachers give just enough really good homework that will successfully meet the needs of both the student and the teacher. What this boils down to is that you don't have to give a ton of homework if the work you do give has a lot of value. It's all about quality instead of quantity.
  • It is okay to use other people's PowerPoints, worksheets, tests, and downloadable templates. :) Really, though, sharing is caring. This ties into Bullet #2. You simply don't have time to make every single thing out there! My personal rule is that I like to make things when I haven't found anything else that will satisfy. As a perfectionist, this kind of happens a lot, but I also know that I can satisfy my perfectionist needs by tweaking the work of others. Example: I downloaded a PowerPoint presentation about King Arthur from the interwebs. The PowerPoint had all of the information I hoped to convey, but it wasn't interactive enough to suit my taste. So instead of making a PowerPoint completely from scratch, I just added in a couple of slides with interactive questions and activities for my students. It took ten minutes.
  • I am not good at making friends. I'm not sure why, but I'm not. It is really important, though, that you attempt to develop some sort of a positive relationship with your coworkers. Teaching is lonely business, otherwise. If you aren't willing to sit at lunch with the science teachers, at least make friends within your department and talk about non-school stuff.
  • Sleep. Seriously. Get enough sleep, especially if you're a real bitch in the mornings like I am. I realized I was being really unfairly cranky towards my first period class and it was really because I just wasn't awake enough to deal with some of them. So, I started going to bed early and waking up earlier. Nowadays I'm up two hours before I have to be at work so I can take out the crankies on my yoga mat and on my morning coffee. I can't tell you the difference this has made in how my days go.
  • I would seriously try to avoid any other major life changes during your first year of teaching. Your first year of teaching will be its own enormously huge change. You really have no idea how much this will affect your life until your go home with whiteboard marker on your fingertips and tape on your pants and you smell like freshmen. (Side note: get pet Febreeze for your classroom, especially if you share students with the P.E. teacher.)
  • Plan your school year. I mean, the whole thing. Not necessarily every single day, but you should know exactly what unit is coming up next and you should know how you're going to do it. This year was the first time I ever did this and it is un-freakin'-believable how much easier my life is. I sat down with a school calendar and a list of all of the things I wanted to do this year, and I planned my year. Keep it flexible (give yourself at least three more days than you think you'll need for each unit to account for fire drills, snowdays, and hangovers) but try to stick with it. I already know that we will begin Shakespeare notes on Friday and we will have the Romeo and Juliet test right around March 1st. I feel powerful.
  • There's a saying out there along the lines of, "Idle hands make children do evil things like stick gum under the desktop and hit each other with rulers." Something like that. There's this cute little idea called "bell-to-bell planning" floating in the education world Kool-Aid right now, but it ain't no joke. I am a true-blue believer in bell ringers, teacher time, teacher-student time, student time, and exit slips. This is close-ish to a typical day, and dependent on the subject matter. My day really runs smoothly like this and we get a lot accomplished in a class period.
    • Minutes 1-10: Bell ringer activity and vocab card
    • Minutes 11-25: Teacher time (lectures and other such teacher-dominated teaching)
    • Minutes 26-40: Teacher-student time (guided practice activities)
    • Minutes 41-45: Student time (students get a headstart on homework, etc.)
    • Minutes 46-50: Exit slips or other such end-of-class assessments
  • Teacher-student relationship is critical in a smoothly operating classroom. I've written in the past about how I take pride in this nowadays. It wasn't the case my first year of teaching. I cannot stress enough the importance of getting to know your students. This is the motto I teach by: I don't teach English. I teach kids.
If you're still reading, you deserve a cookie or something because this is the longest letter ever. Go on. Get up a get a cookie. I'll wait.

I'm only a third year teacher, so I'm not saying you should necessarily take to heart everything I've said here (like spitting in coworkers' coffee... that's probably not a good plan... that will create animosity in the workplace). I do hope, however, that there is some merit to my words and maybe this will keep you from making many of the same mistakes I made my first year.

Teaching is a challenge, and it is a challenge that nothing will prepare you for, not even subbing or student teaching. When you are a teacher, for better or for worse, those kids are yours. Even the most stubborn, bull-headed, big-mouthed kid is yours and he trusts you to take care of his needs, both as a teacher and as a positive adult role model.

You will cry some days. You will want to pull your hair out. You will take a sick day for the sake of mental health. You will write bad words on a student's paper in a fury because twenty days into the Shakespeare unit they said Queen Elizabeth wrote the play Romeo and Juliet and then you'll have to white them out.

But...

You will also laugh a lot. Kids are funny, whether they mean to be or not. I never realized how much I would laugh as a teacher. You will have really amazing days where your lesson goes perfectly. You will have good crying days because your non-reader finished the book you recommended and loved it. You will have a kid hug you one day, for seemingly no reason and it will be a kid that you would never in a million years have expected such a show of affection from. (Side note: I just ended that sentence with a preposition but I can't think of a better way to word it, so screw it. "Screw It" days will happen too.)

And best of all, you will have days where a kid or a parent thanks you for what you do. Last year there was a parent who brought me flowers because I stayed after school for an hour helping her son study for a test. This winter my drama club kids got me a dozen roses and presented them to me after our last show. Even that first year of teaching, when things were so bad, I had a group of wonderful drama club kids who made me a video telling me thank you for everything I had done for them. I still cry when I think about that video and those kids.

I wish you all of the luck in the world. I'm sending good vibes your way, I promise. Don't forget to wear your power heels or a tie to school the first day and be a real hardass, because it is so much easier to get nicer throughout the school year than to get tougher. Save every single picture, note, whatever from a student that makes you smile and hang it up near your desk so you can look at it on bad days. The bulletin board behind my desk is covered with student artwork, letters, and Christmas cards (still) because they are very uplifting on bad days.

Let me be the first to say that, even though I probably don't know you, and even though you may live very far away, and even though you may teach little runny-nosed kids (poor you), and even though you might teach a completely different subject or at a different kind of school, or in a different country, I am here to help you. All you have to do is ask.

And, because no blog post of mine would be complete without it, here is a funny GIF of a guy running from the police with a bucket on his head. I hope his teachers didn't blame themselves for this. There was obviously nothing they could do.

Source

 

Forty Days Facebook Free

I was raised in a Catholic family, so the concept of giving up something for Lent isn't new to me. Besides traditionally giving up meat on Fridays, the idea is to give up something else that is supposed to be a sacrifice. According to my sixth grade teacher (who was a nun, so I trust her word on the matter whole-heartedly), you could also decide to do something instead. She said the purpose of Lent wasn't to give up regular coke and switch to diet because it was healthier. The idea is to give up something in order to become a better person and get closer to God, or to do something that would help others and therefore bring you closer to God.

It's been a while since I really attempted to give up something/do something, but this year I'm going to give it a shot, thanks to a short conversation we had last week at a family get-together. The conversation was basically a "would you rather" scenario, the question being would you rather give up chocolate or Facebook for Lent. If I'm honest, both would be an extreme challenge for me. As soon as I open an internet browser, the first thing I type into the address bar (whether intentionally or not) is "face." The autocomplete immediately fills in Facebook and, if it was my intention to go there, I just hit enter and I'm sucked in for a minimum of twenty minutes and a maximum of... well... I don't think I want to discuss the maximum amount of time I've spent on Facebook. As for chocolate... it's chocolate. It keeps me sane. I keep it in my desk at school, for crying out loud.

I'm okay with my addiction to chocolate, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I am not okay with my addiction to Facebook (damn it, I have it open right now!). Facebook is a time-sucker. What else could I be doing with that time? I could be spending time with my husband (not to be confused with sitting in the same room with him while I browse Facebook and he watches Netflix). I could be working on my manuscript. I could be gussying up some lesson plans. I could be reading. There's any number of far better ways to spend time that getting sucked into the Facebook world and all of these pseudo-lives that people lead there.

Which leads me to my Lenten resolution.


It's actually forty-six days. Apparently the six Sundays of Lent don't count because they are supposed to be mini-Easters or something. Actually, Sundays can be used as "cheat days" for your Lenten observation, though I won't be doing that. You learn something new all the time.
At this point, I'm not willing to give up Facebook entirely. Quite honestly, I often use Facebook the way I believe it is meant to be used - to keep up with family and friends that you don't get to see so often. But I am willing to try giving it up for a while. Can I live without Facebook? We're going to find out.

I should mention, for the purpose of full disclosure, that I will take the five minutes every once in a while to keep up my school's drama club page because that's part of my job. I'm going to do this at school where I won't be tempted to look at my personal Facebook.

I think by giving up Facebook, I'm doing what is meant to be done during Lent, 21st century style. I think my time will be better spent dedicated to my real life, to my husband, my family, my students, my faith, and myself. I'm giving up Facebook and replacing that with a focus on my real life and my 13 for '13.

I'm not giving up the Intenet as a whole, because quite frankly, that would be impossible with my job. I use the internet daily for school. Also, I love keeping up with this blog, and I think it's healthy for my writer's brain. Facebook is what will have to go.

You may wonder why wait until February 13th? Why not start now? The honest answer is that I'm not ready. I have several people that I communicate with exclusively through Facebook and I need to establish another form on contact that isn't a phone because I HATE talking on the phone, even more than I hate texting. (Yeah, I'm weird. I'm cool with that.) Also, I'm one of those people that has to set a date for a major life change in order for it to happen, which makes me feel kind of stupid, but it's whatevs.

I feel like the first couple of days (weeks?), it's gonna go like this everytime someone says, "Hey, did you see that thing on Facebook?"

Source
 Wish me luck!