What advice would you give a first-year
high school teacher?
When you are just starting out as a high school teacher, your job is going to be hard; it’s going to be really hard. When I first started teaching, I didn’t like my job. I was looking for a different job and fortunately I couldn’t find one, one that would help me pay for my mortgage at the time, so I stayed in teaching. But my third year of teaching, I got surplused to a middle school and I taught a regular full load of classes. But I taught one class that was called Math 8, and it was after lunch, and those kids ate me alive. It just ruined my weekends. I really didn’t like my job. And then we had a teacher work day to do some grading and I spoke with a veteran teacher. He’s my hero. I asked him, I said, “I’m having a class and I am having a really hard time with discipline in the class and it’s killing me. It’s ruining my weekends. It’s hard to sleep at night. I wake up in the middle of the night.” He gave me some pretty good structured plans to get that class settled down and he told me it would take a lot of work, and it did, it took a lot of work. He said it would take about six weeks, but he said you must follow this pattern and I did and he was right. It was a lot of work, but those kids came around and all of a sudden I liked my job, and I started having fun, and the next year was so much better. It gets better, it gets easier. I can’t believe it. This is my 15th year and its better than my 14th year, which was better than my 13th year and some how it keeps getting better and better and better. So my advice to a new teacher is to hang in there. It gets better and the job is awesome; it’s a great job.
