I just finished my first day as a teacher, and I was wondering if there are any other teachers on this board. Chris Shugart, I recall you saying that you were a teacher (and I actually have the issue of the Dinosaur Files where you wrote in and talked about how you were training some jr. dinosaurs at your HS). Do you or any tmen/tgirls have any advice for me? Things to look out for, what to do in cettain situations, anything at all. I’d like to write more but I’m so f’n tired…now I understand why my teachers in HS used to mainline coffee all day long!
Teaching advice:
* Hope you were born to do it. It can’t be taught, although it can be improved upon.
* Toss 90% of what you learned in college into the garbage.
* Break the rules. Rebel as a teacher. If you teach nothing like other teachers then you are on the right path. Most teachers suck.
* If you get bored with what you’re teaching, the kids were bored 20 minutes before that. Don’t get bored.
* Don’t rely on a textbook. Only hack teachers do that. The very best teachers have no textbooks. (You will not be able to do this for the first few years.)
* Don’t give homework out of habit. Homework is usually pointless, the last resort of a poor teacher, and even the smart kids cheat when given too much. If you can’t get them to learn something in the time you have, they aren’t going to learn it at home.
* Read and discuss books as a class, regardless of subject matter. Do not assign books from book lists made by someone else. Don’t be afraid to use fun, modern books. Your goal is NOT to get kids to read books you yourself found boring and pointless in high school. Your goal is to get them to read for pleasure, to love a good book. You cannot do this with most books teachers force students to read.
* Never give a test you didn’t make yourself. Do not give tests copied out of a book.
* Teach them to think, not to memorize. Poor teachers make the mistake of giving kids things to memorize rather than problems to solve.
* Before you give an assignment, ask yourself why. If you can’t think of a reason, don’t give the assignment. Do not use “filler” assignments.
* Get books on lateral thinking skills and other mental puzzles and short brain games. Do one “thinking problem” at the beginning of every class. They’ll learn to use their brains and they’ll think it’s fun.
* Teach them to play chess, regardless of your subject area.
* Don’t fuck the girls. You will get offers every year if you teach high school. Maybe Jr. high too. If you are female, don’t fuck the boys. If you are bisexual, don’t fuck any of them.
* Don’t have many rules. The worst teachers have the most rules.
* The first year will be the hardest, but it gets easier after that. I remember leaving the school at 10 at night every night for much of the first year.
* Discipline kids in private, not in front of their peers.
* Do not judge the kids by the way they dress. Blue haired freaks wearing dog collars are often smarter and better students than preppy kids. And much more fun to talk to.
* Never teach on one topic for the whole class. Do at least three different things per class, more if you can.
* Don’t punish kids for stupid shit as long as they are learning. Don’t enforce dress codes, don’t give detention for not bringing a pencil, etc. The best teachers don’t need to do these things. Only poor teachers have a lot of discipline problems. That said, this skill of handling discipline will take a few years to develop. None of us are very good at it in the first year or two.
* If you don’t like teaching, quit. It’s too important a job to fuck around with.
* If you can, find a mentor and go watch him or her teach in your conference period. Watch bad teachers teach too and do the opposite in your own class.
* Remember, you are there for the kids, not to please other teachers or the administration. Fight the power when called for.
What are you teaching, where, and at what grade level?
most classes i grew up liking were ones where at some time or another the teacher made the class form a circle and kinda forced us to talk (this can be done as a class as a whole but the best was to break the class into groups and only let one group go at a time and the rest of the class couldnt comment but only listen)sure the first few times felt awkward for all but after a while they were pretty fun and i think open dialogue is a great way to learn, how this will relate to the subject you teach i dunno but just an idea if you shared the subject you teach i could post more, oh yeah before i leave another cool thing a teacher can do is take a journal and make comments to the student and have kinda a written exchange but dont assign topics but tell them it has to be on thoughts not what they fucking ate for lunch
I’d second most of what Chris said, and add a few things. But with poorer grammar. I teach economics and history.
-You can be their friend, or you can be their teacher, but you can’t be both, and you aren’t being paid to be their friend.
-Cover your ass. Document everything you do, ‘cause when the shit hits the fan, most administrators will run for cover.
-Never, never, never be alone with a student of the opposite sex. All it takes is one accusation, and your career will be over.
-Join a teachers association/union. Whether or not you go to meetings doesn’t matter, but they will provide an attorney for you if necessary. Think of it as car insurance.
-Keep a professional distance between yourself and your students. You may share interests with them, but for God’s sake, don’t share a beer with them.
-Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know the answer.” Too many teachers are afraid that to do so will erode their authority, unaware that clinging to an answer that is wrong will do it even faster.
-Be willing to learn from your students. These kids have areas in which they are just as expert as you are in yours.
-Respect must be earned, and it is a line which travels in both directions. Treat them as human beings, and you’d be suprised what may happen.
-Try and remember what it was like to be a teenager in a world where popularity was everything.
-Remember that there is a tremendous difference between freshmen and seniors, and most rules in HS are designed for the freshmen.
-Talk to the experienced teachers when you have a problem you can’t solve.
-Give the students the love of learning, and the learning itself will be sure to follow. I’m not sure where I read that, but it’s good. Anyone can read a book, it’s having the desire to open the book that is crucial.
-Show up to their activities. It means more to these kids than you’ll ever know to look up and see you watching their freshman basketball game.
-Be aware of your clientele. I went from west Texas to a suburb where the kids drive BMWs. Dealing with each set of kids has its’ own set of challenges.
-Keep in contact with your students’ parents. If they feel that you have their childs best interests at heart, they’ll back you up in most cases. And in others, they can make your life miserable. So hope that your principal is a stand up guy.
-The first year is the toughest. I almost didn’t go back after Christmas, but I got some good advice, and decided to tough it out. Just started my 8th year.
This is just a smattering of things I’ve learned, maybe Chris can put you in touch with me if you ever need some support. BTW, I believe that Shugsy and I used to live and teach a couple of towns over from each other. Do the Cooper Cougars sound familiar Shugsy?
I taught English and history at a private high school for my first two years out of college, but now I’m back in grad school. Teaching is an amazing experience. I don’t agree with everything the other posters said, but I do agree with most of it. Good luck!
I’ve never been a teacher, per se, but I’ve been in many situations where I’ve been in a teacher role with varying ages of kids. Everything stated by these other posters is spot-on. I also look back on the classes where I learned the most, and many times it had NOTHING to do with the actual subject of the class, and these where by far the teachers that I respected the most. As a point of reference, I graduated second in my class, so you can take that as maybe some type of “where this is coming from” state.
I remember one particular teacher in jr. high that was teaching English. One of the things he did was called “greek bits and peices” – basically how many of the english words are put together from greek language, and what those “bits and pieces” really mean. This same teacher left the teaching profession about half-way through the school year, and his last three weeks he did lectures on so many subjects: pitching in baseball, truck driving as a profession, journalism, you name it. Many times he’d ask for questions, and spend the whole hour exploring the answers to those questions.
In high school, I had a social studies teacher that had played international professional soccer, and had toured Africa. One of the more interesting things we did in that class was to learn some rudimentary Swahili language. He had tape recordings of interviews of tribesman in mixed Swahili and english that he played.
There are so many more examples that I could type all day.
Maybe you can find some inspiration in movies – Mr. Holland’s Opus, Remeber the Titans (not really teaching, but there’s some good stuff in there), Stand and Deliver, Summer School.
I am not a teacher, but a student. I thought I would give you an example from my college. We have all sorts of teachers, and I can tell you that it is always good to be friend with your students.I am not saying you should be “let’s call each other every day” friends, but you do have to know your students quite well. Beer drinking was mentioned.Funny, because at the end of my previous academic year, my radiology teacher invited us to have a beer with him. The same teacher sometimes swears, make jokes, yet he is not primitive.He knows exactly what he is doing.Student always loved to go his classes,and guess what-he managed to teach us radiology perfectly-mission accomplished. The bottom line is- take some time to know your students,that will definitely pay off.
*Don't teach more than 20 minutes in a non-stop manner.We have some classes where old-fashioned teacher talk for 90 minutes. How effective is that?
*Seize the day.If the day is extraordinary beautiful,give your students a break, and make up for lost time sometimes in the near future
*I do advocate liberal teaching, but definitely know when to draw a line
The friend thing can be very tricky. A teacher does need to “come out from behind the desk/podium” and be human and friendly. I never went for that “don’t smile until after Christmas” nonsense.
Being a “friend” in a limited sense can also really help with discipline. I’ve become “friends” with many a gang member/problem child by overstepping the students/teacher relationship a bit. A made many of them training partners, gave them rides home, bought them a coke, talked music with them, loaned them CDs, skateboarded with them at lunch etc. I even had a weight bench set up in my classroom and would show them different exercises. It’s hard for a kid, even a bad one, to stir up trouble after the teacher has just spent ten minutes talking to him on a “friend” basis about non-school issues. The “friend” thing may be looked down upon, but I’ve used it to prevent kids from dropping out of school and have prevented at least three suicides because I overstepped the “friend” boundary. I’ve pulled kids out of gangs too by being a friend.
Funny, but my two best friends are both former students and we do have beers together sometimes. But they’re both out of college now, have started families, and obviously are not just students any more. Also, a college prof can be a friend much easier than a HS teacher.
But, there is a fine line. I’ve seen a lot of young teachers lose control by trying to be friends with students who then take advantage of them. There’s nothing worse than an uncool teacher overtly trying to be friends with the cool kids in an effort to make-up for something he or she didn’t have in high school. In this case, the friend thing doesn’t work.
I was always able to be friendly and human while still taking care of business. But I don’t think everyone can pull that off. Like I said before, much of teaching is raw talent, instinctive, you either have it or you don’t. And you must always teach according to your personality. Don’t fake it.
Yes, I taught at a couple of schools just outside of Abilene and have been to Cooper many times. I also graduated from Hardened Sinners University in Abilene.
Chris S.
Chris, I’m from Almost Christian University myself.
Welcome aboard! Although I agree with much of what has already been written here, I do have to say that some of that advice is befitting more experienced teachers. As a novice teacher you have to follow the directions of your administrators or you will be turfed. You need to do the stuff that they ask you to do and if it’s anything like the school that I am in you will be swamped with paperwork, especially the first week or two. If your school has a dress code–you do need to enforce it or you will look bad to the administration. Keep on top of the kids and communicate soon and often with their parents. Pick your battles. They like to “go to the bathroom” often, especially if the classes are long. Have them sign out and then back in. If one of your kids gets accused of something at least you know whether he was really out of the room or not. Ask lots of questions and become a pest until you get your answers. Schools are chaotic and everyone fends for themselves and forgets that there are newbies around who just don’t know the ropes. Ask! Realize that some kids just don’t care and they have a right to fail. It’s okay. Don’t take it personally. When you have 30 kids or more in your classes you will not reach all of them, try as you might. Relax. Sleep. Have a life outside of school.It will get easier. You will have some tough classes and you will have some great classes. Computers do that. They don’t try to balance out the students for the teachers’ convenience. If your course has a text and you are not the only one teaching it, you do need to use it because in most schools, all sections of any course must cover pretty much the same stuff. If you’re the only one teaching the course, that’s different–you can personalize more. Be creative. Don’t worry about entertaining the students. They can be entertained after school. Sometimes the material is just boring, but it needs to be taught. If you can spice it up–great. Don’t bust your ass trying to think of a way to spice up everything however. Be very careful about how much you ask to be handed in. Marking can be quite a burden. Know what to mark and when. Spend only as much time marking something as it appears the student spent creating it. In other words, if the end product looks like it was slapped together at the last minute, don’t pour over it looking for ways to give it marks. If you can’t read it, don’t mark it. Have them redo it. Insist on black or blue pens. Those pastel coloured gel pens are horrible to try to read! Anyways. I could go on, but I think others have said a lot that is really good too.
What subject and grade levels are you teaching? Good luck. You are not alone.
I’ve been teaching 6th,7th, and 8th grade (Algebra and pre-Algebra) for three years now.
I agree with a lot of what was said above, but some I have to take issue with. You can be
a good teacher even if you aren’t passionate about teaching in and of itself. There are
many good teachers who are just so passionate about their subject area that kids can’t
help to learn. There are also good teachers (and I include myself in this category) who
are passionate about something that teaching helps them pursue. I never had any desire
to teach, but halfway through law school I knocked up the lovely lady who is now my
wife. She already had a four year old daughter, so I got the instant family package. I became damn passionate about feeding my family, and as a result I think I’ve become a
pretty damn good teacher. Another example of this is an English teacher I had in high
school who was an avid surfer. He chose teaching only to have June, July, and August
off, yet he was one of the best teachers I ever had. I also COMPLETELY disagree with
Shugart’s advice of “Don’t punish kids for stupid shit as long as they are learning. Don’t
enforce dress codes, don’t give detention for not bringing a pencil, etc. The best teachers
don’t need to do these things. Only poor teachers have a lot of discipline problems.” It’s true that good teachers don’t have many discipline problems, but that isn’t because they don’t enforce rules. Good teachers hold their students to high standards. Kids need to learn to follow rules. Part of your job is to prepare these kids for the rest of their life. You are not doing them a favor by teaching them
that certain rules don’t apply to them, or that they aren’t responsible for their actions. It’s
always easy to try to be the “nice guy”, but that doesn’t make it right. If you don’t enforce
the dress code, you are just screwing your coworkers who do. There also needs to be
some consequence for not bringing your materials (pencil, paper, books) to class. It
teaches responsibility that these kids are going to need in the real world. In the real
world you go to work dressed appropriately (as determined by your company) and you go
prepared.
I teach in a school on the Texas/Mexico border that is 100% socio-economically
disadvantaged and 86% migrant students. That means their families travel across the
country picking crops. The school was started by two 23 year old Teach For America
graduates who thought they could do it better. Last year we were recognized as one of
the top three schools in Texas. They were right. The single best piece of advice I can
give you is to find someone from Teach for America and pick their brains. These people
are amazing and have more dedication to the profession than you can begin to imagine.
I’ll list some of what I’ve learned from them during the last three years. Read THE FIRST
DAYS OF SCHOOL five or six times. It is invaluable. Develop procedures for
everything in your class. How to sharpen pencils, how to hand in papers, what to do as
soon as the bell rings, what to do if you need to speak, what your class quiet signal is.
Use the first couple of days to practice these procedures over and over until the kids
understand you mean it. The time spent will pay for itself a million times over the rest of
the year. If you are leaving school at the end of the day exhausted, you are doing it
wrong. The kids should drag ass to the bus in the afternoon and you should still be fresh.
Read anything on cooperative learning by Johnson and Johnson. I have structured my
class to so that the kids come in and immediately start to work on what is posted on the
board under DO NOW. I check role, then quickly go over that board work, grade papers,
lecture for no more than 10 to 15 minutes, lead the students through several practice
problems, and then the kids work with their squads of four on the homework. Everyone
in the squad is held individually accountable for knowing the information every week on
a test, but the squad is also accountable as a whole. I have set weekly and monthly goals
for the squads and they are rewarded for achieving them. No one in the squad can have
detention during the week, there is only one abscence per squad per week allowed,
everyone in the squad must score at least 75 on the weekly test, the squad must average at
least 80 on the test, and the squad cannot be reprimanded (for being off task, ect) more
than 3 times per week. If these goals are met, I give them an Eat/Drink in class pass, a
computer time pass, a free time pass, ect. These cost me nothing, but save me massive
amounts of aggravation. I chart each squads performance on the wall, and if the squad
meets the weekly goal 7 out of 9 weeks in a quarter I have a pizza party for them. In all I
may end up spending $200 a year on pizza. In return I have VERY few discipline
problems and the students are motivated to make sure everyone in class understands the
material. They teach each other. This also helps to keep you from focusing all year on
those four or five struggling kids while you ignore the “good” kids who get it. It gives
everyone a role to play.
More advice. Demand students do their absolute best work on EVERY single
assignment. Don’t let even one kid coast on one assignment without calling him on it.
The respect this will get you is priceless. Always check for understanding before you
move on to something new. Also, never call on a student before you ask a question. Ask
the class, pause, and then call on someone. That way they all are forced to think about
the answer. During your off period sit in on other teacher’s classes. You’ll learn a lot
about teaching (good and bad), but you’ll also see the your students in other settings.
During the summer, get a class roster and do home visits. This does so much for you.
The students show up the first day feeling like they know you, so their behavior is much
better. The students know that you’ve met their parents and will be in contact with them.
You can see if the kid has a quiet place for school work. You can find out if they have to
babysit 5 siblings every evening. You can talk to them about their favorite/least favorite
subjects. You can determine the amount of parental support the student has. In a lot of
cases, you may end up being that kids support if it doesn’t come from home. It doesn’t
take more than 15 minutes per kid to totally change your school year. Make all of your
big tests WAY in advance and hold yourself accountable for covering all of the
information you want the students to learn. All teachers at my school have to turn in all
of our quarter exams to the office on the first day of school. It is amazing how you can
be motivated to find solutions instead of making excuses for not covering it all. Stay
away from the old negative teachers as much as possible. They will suck your very soul
out. Give all of your students you home and cell phone numbers and tell them to call if
they have problems with school work. Don’t take “I didn’t understand” as an excuse the
next day in class if you didn’t get a call. Don’t forget that you have summers off. Be
consistent, be fair, have high standards.
Personally, I see no reason to harass kids and take up time for learning by enforcing silly dress codes. Example- at one school I taught at shorts were allowed but they had to be long. This was measured by one dollar bill’s height above the knee. The old fat bat teachers would run around the halls and class trying to catch girls whose shorts were half an inch off. This accomplished many things: It made the students hate the teachers and it took up valuable time. The kids were sent home to change, forced to miss half the class. I’m sure they learned a lot that way.
I was an educator, not a member of the fashion police. It was a silly rule and I ignored it. I am quite sure none of my former students walked into a job interview at age 23 wearing a beanie and nothing else because their high school English teacher did not send them home because their shorts were a half inch off, or they wore a sleeveless shirt, or wore a jacket that had a tobacco logo on it. There is a difference is enforcing the rules and teaching blind conformity. And I did not care what the administration thought - my kids broke state records every year in their test scores and make my school one of the top in Texas. If you get fired because you didn’t enforce the dress code, then you probably sucked as a teacher and they were looking for a reason to dump you. If you’re good and you get results, you can get by with a lot.
As for stupid things like giving detention for not bringing a pencil, trust me, administration hates that shit. One principal told me, “For God’s sake, I wish these other teachers would control their class and stop sending kids to me for dumb things like forgetting a pencil. It’s a waste of time!” I think some teachers think that sending a lot of kids to detention (or whatever) makes them look good. It doesn’t. Again, being that strict takes away from your real job - teaching your subject. Kids forget pencils. Big deal. Writing them up for it only makes them hate you and they will not work for teachers they hate and have no respect for. I didn’t and neither should they. Some teachers are like some parents: they don’t deserve automatic respect because of their positions. There is a difference between enforcing necessary rules and having so many damn rules that the kids can’t burp without getting written up for it. I’ve never met a really good, effective teacher that had to have a mile long list of classroom rules. And 9 times out of 10, the worst teachers had the most rules, most of them pointless. And yes, I agree very strongly with setting high standards. My standards were so high I didn’t need many rules. They knew what was proper and what was not without me spelling them out like they were 3rd graders.
I’d also add that there are very few unreachable kids. In 7 years of teaching, I only had a handful. It’s true that some are hopeless and are only there to disrupt others. Get rid of them if possible. If they want to fail, let them. Don’t waste your time; many of these kids are simply waiting to drop out. Don’t hold back or punish a whole class because of one of these losers. But again, they’re rare.
One last thing. Don’t get enamored with the kids who are good at “playing school”. These are often the “perfect” kids who never say a word and always make good grades. Many are not even that smart, they can be uncreative, followers; they simply play the game well. In many cases the “bad” kids (not bring-a-gun-to-school-bad, but bad as in rowdy, talkative etc) are the true movers and shakers of the future. They may be so smart that they’re bored with your class. Study successful people, people who really do something with their lives and make a difference. You’ll find that they were often troublemakers in school, rebels, nonconformist, jokers. I knew this so I saw no need to squash their individuality and beat them into conformity (especially when I didn’t agree with some of the school rules myself.) That would have been easy. It’s much harder to reach those kids, challenge them, excite them, and channel their energy into something productive. I guess it’s like parenting. It’s easy to be a bad parent, but it takes a hell of a lot of work to be a good one. I had the choice many times of sending a kid to the office or skipping lunch to work with him. I chose the latter, and a couple of times it saved the kid’s life.
I’m not trying to insult those who disagree. We must teach according to our own personality and style. One style of teaching may work for some kids and not for others. And a teacher can’t fake a style, no matter how effective that style is. It’s good that kids have many teachers because there’s sure to be one that will make a real difference in a kid’s life.
(Oh, and keep in mind I taught older kids, not 6th graders. I could see using more structure and rigitity with younger kids just entering “adulthood”.)
I agree that kids shouldn’t be sent to the administration for petty things like lack of pencils. That kind of stuff better be handled in your class. I have never in three years sent a kid to the office. It’s very important that the kids understand you are the authority figure. I don’t have any class rules posted. I discuss what I expect the first day of class, and that’s it. If I’m talking shut up and look at me. If I give you time to work together, you better be working. Procedures are much more useful than rules. I still think it is very uncool to not enforce rules like the dress code just because you don’t like them. If you don’t like them, get them changed. Tell the kids you don’t like them, but that you expect them to be followed. If the kids truly respect you, they’ll follow the rules. We require shirts to be tucked in and belts to be worn and I rarely have to tell a kid to tuck in his shirt. When I do they say, “Sorry, Sir” and tuck it in. I worked a lot of crap jobs earlier in my life, and I saw way too many morons sitting in human resources waiting to interview with a tie on and their short sleeved shirt untucked.
What an awesome thread. Makes me want to get back to teaching again (I’m getting my masters for permanent certification right now…). Anyways, I think that one of the best things you can do is try to make the class feel like they are responsible for the class in terms of its success. The more ‘ownership’ and feelings of self-respect these kids can get, the better.
*Think about these two words: Authoritarian and Authoritative. Which do you want to be recognized as?
*I think Shugart said this already, but learn about your kids. Understanding whats going on their lives can be a huge help to dealing with any situations that do come up.
*It helps if you love your subject.
*Multiple learning styles.
*Find as much good as possible in every student… trust me, it helps.
*involve the students in ‘real-life’ applications of whatever it is they are learning. During my student teaching, I developed an eight week project for my Music Theory and History class to compose pieces in the style of composers we had discussed. Even though I guided them through it step by step, it was hard as hell, but it made them apply their knowledge in a wholistic sense, and thats a good thing.
Well I graduated in 99. I can’t tell you anything about teaching. I can tell you, being one of the talkative and rowdy kids, the things which cause me to be that way. Busy work assignments. Assignment which were just stupid, i.e. write 10 words that describe yourself. Being put in a group with a bunch of dorks, usually then you would have to act out instead of just talking with your buddies in that group. Dumb rules, i.e. dress code, sign out to use the bathroom next door, giving tardys for not being in your desk when the bell rang, etc. Teachers thinking you are actually interested in the stuff they are teaching when you have no intention on pursuing that field. Also being told to do something and the teacher overreacting. One teacher was so pissed when anyone used anything but pen in her class. We just all started turning assignment in, written in crayon, just because she got so upset. If she just would have asked, instead of making a big point about using pen at the beginning of class. Funny though how my grade point average was ok, but my ACT/SAT scores were higher than most of the bookworms. The poster about showing up for athletic events, and asking about how students are doing, i.e. school functions is right on. Also just laugh and have fun as a teacher too, there are far too many teachers who seem so pissed off in life for no reason. Geez, start the class off with a joke everyday, you don’t have to make one up just ask the class for one. Just say a stupid one, kids will laugh and have fun.
Thanx for all the responses, for the first time ever I didn’t read all of them because, frankly, I don’t have the time! Its 630 am and I have to jump in the shower and go. But here’s some info: I was not an education major, so i don’t have tactics/methods to “unlearn” as some of you suggested. I am teaching Italian to 9 & 10 graders, in a Western New Jersey town that is expanding rapidly. The school is absolutely gorgeous, looks more like a Comm College than a HS: it has 4or 5 buildings, tons of fields, tennis courts, computeres, vcrs and stereos in every class. Basically a wealthy suburb. I am coming in thru alternate certification, and will be taking classes in the spring to get my education credits. Teaching is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, in fact i was enrolled in grad school in fall 99 but ended up dropping out. i want to write mote but I really haave to go in order to avoid traffic on 287. I’ll write more this evening.