five easy pieces

Advice for incoming teachers! This will probably sound preachy, so I apologize in advance.

1. Choose the ditch you're gonna die in. During your experience, you'll see a lot of things that need changing, and you may have the best ideas in the world as to how those changes should be made. You're smart, educated, and used to sharing your opinion. No matter how right you are, sharing that opinion at the wrong time will make you a lot of enemies. Hold your tounge. If you try to change everything you see wrong with the system (much of this will be administrative) you're going to come off as a know-it-all. Until you've established a little bit of credibility, no one's going to listen to you anyway: you're green, you're an outsider, you're young, and possibly a white and a yankee, to boot. If you really want to effect change, choose one thing you really care about. Then hold your tounge, as difficult as that may be. Wait until people respect you. When you first arrive, before you've proven yourself, they may not respect you or you're opinion, and you'll just come off as arrogant/naive.

2. Don't work too hard. Figure out what you have to do, and what's a waste of your time. Often times, first year teachers, in their striving for excellence, attempt to do it all. This is a very good way to burn out. Teaching is a big job, but-- remember that old axe, 'don't work harder, work smarter?'-- it's true. Don't spend countless hours writing comments on papers that most students are just going to throw away. Don't let papers pile up, waiting to be graded. If anything has been on your desk longer than a week, just throw it away. Grades aren't important, anyway. Learning is. If students are going to work harder for a grade, fabulous. Grades are a good motivation. But they're not what's important. Have a rubric, do check/check-plus/check-minus, do scantron, whatever, just do NOT spend all your time grading. If you are planning on working eighty hours a week, spend it in tutoring, chess club, track, or remediation. Plan a research paper or a class trip. Think about lesson plans and goals. Recognize how much work you have in you, and don't exceed that limit. If you go crazy, you won't be any good to anybody.

3. Don't bring work home with you. I don't know how realistic this is for some of you, it depends on the situation. I'll come to school early and I'll stay late, but I will not, under any circumstances, do work at home. If I am foolish enough to bring my briefcase home with me with the idea that I'm going to grade papers, it remains unopened and I just have one more thing to lug to school the next day. You have to have some space in order to remain focused. If you don't have a sanctuary, then your whole life is work. Don't let it saturate everything you do. If you live with other teachers, make an effort to talk about other things once in a while. Go out, experience some Mississippi Culture. Read a novel, go running, have friends over for dinner-- just do something that you enjoy that isn't school.

4. Don't take any problem with a student (or co-worker, or administrator) personally. Often we let our conflicts with others define our perceptions of them. You'll be suprised to find that the students who you couldn't stand at the beginning of the year turn out to be your favorites. Never get angry or upset by anything a student says to you. Always treat them with respect and never react emotionally. Enforce the rules, not because you're angry with a student, but because you care about them. Realize that it will all be water under the bridge in a week's time, if that.

5. Don't be too hard on yourself. You're going to make mistakes, you will struggle, you will, at times, be incredibly frustrated. Don't give up. Stick to it. You have no idea how much of a difference you are making in these student's lives. Focus on them. It's actually a great opportunity for you, and a great honor, to be entrusted with the well-being of so many human beings.

A final note (three things they say in Cameroon): patience. courage. perserverance.