Teaching, Part II
The tale of my first few weeks, with an abundance of metaphors to help readers get the picture.
My first newsletter was the story of how I was hired as a teacher in the first place. If you have not read that newsletter and would like to catch up, you can access that here. As you will recall, I was hired to teach a mere thirteen days before the school year started. The following, then, is the story of those thirteen days, and the wisdom I gained from that experience.
The first thing I had to do before starting school was to quit my other jobs. I was working at a local news outlet as well as a deli at a local supermarket. Quitting the news outlet was strange because I had only worked there for a few months. I never blew anybody’s socks off with my mundane stories about mundane things, but they had created an entirely new position for me, albeit part-time and frustratingly sporadic. In addition to writing freelance articles covering local politics a few times a week at $50 per article, I would come into the office once a week and write paid endorsements for local businesses. I wrote, for instance, about a pizza restaurant called Papa Joe’s, a firearms and fishing store called Bill’s Sporting Goods, and a miscellaneous store selling everything from used records to handmade soaps called Berkshire Emporium. These articles were paid for by the businesses, and I was the only one who wrote them. Therefore, quitting this job was somewhat awkward, considering that the job was built around me. But the publisher of the paper, despite not catching on that I wanted to be hired full-time, was graciously polite about my decision to leave.
The same was true of my other employer, Big Y. I had been working there just over a year and had become a bologna-slicing, potato-salad-scooping aficionado. In the weeks before I left, the assistant manager of the deli even asked me if I wanted to take a step up the hierarchy by starting a full-time position as a cheese merchant (yes, that’s a thing). The entire establishment was very congratulatory of me when I told them that I was becoming a teacher, and even though I had to quit without giving the customary two weeks’ notice, I was treated with much respect.
Once I left those two part-time jobs, the daunting task ahead became much more concrete. I had less than two weeks to prepare to stand in front of a series of seventh grade classes for seven hours per day. As the starting day inched closer, I became more nervous and felt less prepared than ever.
I was not the only one who experienced this lack of preparation. As I mentioned in my first post, there were around fifteen new teachers at the start of the school year, including me. At least five of us had never been in front of a classroom before; two of us had graduated college just three months before. Those fifteen teachers were welcomed into the district with a program called New Teacher’s Orientation (NTO). NTO is designed to familiarize new teachers with the routines and procedures that characterize my school district. The program required attendance at an NTO luncheon (I was hired too late to go to this, which was really too bad, because I love luncheons), as well as a few days of extra preparation before the rest of the teachers arrived. (NTO also consisted of a series of remote sessions and a course for new teachers on Canvas, an online learning platform, but this is unimportant for the purposes of this specific newsletter.)
These extra days before school started were packed with information on the school, its procedures, and the curriculum that each team of teachers was to deliver. As readers can probably imagine, this deluge of information was overwhelming to the point of being more of a hindrance than a help. The principal and other administrators explained how to use the attendance-taking software; how to use the electronic system that issues bathroom passes to students; how and when to send students out of the classroom for misbehavior; how to access the online learning platforms Canvas and HMH; what the bell schedule was; when and what lunch duty was; and many more topics. I tried taking notes on some of this information, but catching everything was like trying to corral a flock of free-range chickens who had just witnessed an execution of one of their own.
Moreover, I learned way too much about curriculum and not nearly enough about classroom management, which is teacher jargon for “getting hormonal pre-teens to sit down and shut up.” For instance, my school had committed itself to using the Collins Writing Program, a reputable system of teaching kids to write that is actually quite intuitive. Yet I had never taught anything before, and so learning about the Collins Writing Program–especially without fully delving into it myself–was useless without knowing how to prepare lessons.
Furthermore, it is almost impossible to teach anything–even the most intuitive program in the world–when most of your classroom time is taken up by redirecting misbehaving miscreants.
During the remaining two days before school began, I was introduced to the seventh grade English team, whose longest-serving member was a woman who had only been teaching for three years at the school. She was eminently qualified, with at least one Doctorate in education, but her lack of confidence in leading a team, and her own inexperience, were apparent throughout the school year. This is not to diminish her worth as a teacher, but merely to point out that it is hard to teach if the team leader is green herself.
We spent hours learning about our curriculum, HMH–about which I will have much to say in forthcoming posts–and learning the difference between the two classes we were to teach. This is somewhat confusing, but bear with me: All teachers at my school have to teach five classes in a day. English teachers, however–and some other subject teachers–have to teach two different kinds of classes in a day. These classes were completely separate, so we had to plan two different lessons each day. This was especially difficult for someone who had never planned a lesson in his life prior to September 1, 2021.
All of this, of course, was preparation for the first day of school. And yet, us new teachers were taught almost nothing about what to do on the first day of classes. One thing that will always stick with me was that a mentor of mine texted me the night before classes began and said, basically, “good luck. If you don’t know what to say, just take your kids around a tour of your room.”
That first day is truly a blur. I remember it being fairly warm out and immediately sweating through my long-sleeve shirt (due to a lack of air conditioning in our school district). I remember being somewhat flustered in front of my first few classes, but becoming more confident throughout the day. I remember (vaguely) taking attendance for the first time, and writing down names when someone preferred to be called by a nickname (the best was Mercury). Beyond that, however, I actually remember very little. Perhaps this was one of those traumatizing moments that my protective brain buried like a spent nuclear fuel rod. Either way, that first day revealed how woefully underprepared I was to teach. Over time, I would become better and more confident; but that first week felt like being pushed out of an airplane and being told how to deploy the parachute when I already had one foot out of the door.
I have spent many hours reflecting on this first week in my own head, and I want to share some of the wisdom I gained with my readers. First, it is no wonder why so many new teachers leave within five or ten years. Teaching is hard and stressful, and a teacher’s first year can feel like being tossed into the deep end without knowing how to swim (sorry for all the metaphors, but I am an English teacher). Second, administrators should spend far less time teaching curriculum to new teachers and far more time demonstrating discipline. This is a topic I will certainly return to in subsequent newsletters. But as I said earlier, it is hard to teach anything when you cannot control your classroom. Finally, schools need to have in place far more robust mentoring programs. Because we had so many new teachers, my school’s mentors (veteran teachers who could help out when needed) functioned as a team, rather than a traditional one-on-one role. I found that the most helpful moments were simply chatting with an experienced teacher rather than attending a mentoring session.
Luckily, I am almost infinitely more mentally prepared for the coming school year than I was last year. Despite my relative inexperience, I had an entire year to reflect on how to teach better. In that way, I am thankful for being led into a dark wood with no map or compass. I was forced to adapt, observe, and focus my energies on preparing for my next year.
Stay tuned for more tales from middle school. If you like my newsletters, and/or you want to help me grow this thing into a worldwide phenomenon, please forward this email to a friend, family member, or anyone else who you think would benefit from it. I will be back in your inbox a week from today.
A disclaimer: Due to a deeper consideration of some of the career risks I run in writing this newsletter, I have edited this and other newsletters to remove some identifying information that I included when I wrote it at first. I don’t think it will take away from the value of the newsletter, but you may notice some awkward repetitions of words or phrases (like “the Vice Principal”) to avoid identifying anybody by name. Thank you for your understanding.
Good stuff. Love the metaphors. Seems during your first year you were about as successful as a one legged man in a butt kicking contest.