In late August, the pleasure of summer relaxation begins to overlap with the excitement of a new school year. It's a wonderful time to be a teacher. While trying to catch my last wave or last fish of the summer, I begin a mental routine that energizes me and prepares me for the next ten months of teaching and learning. Part of this routine involves a series of affirmations I use to update and re-familiarize myself with my teaching philosophies and techniques. This year, I've combined my affirmations with a few practical tips that I believe will help those new to teaching -- or veteran teachers for that matter -- prepare philosophically and practically for a successful school year. Here they are, in no particular order:
- Actively seek out advice and guidance from veteran teachers. Listen to them and trust them. You'll find that the knowledge you acquired in your pre-teaching coursework is rapidly trumped by front-line classroom experience. Keep in mind that the best mentor for you doesn't necessarily need to teach in your department. Make sure that your are asking questions more frequently than you are offering opinions. But at the same time...
When it comes to engaging your students, showing them how much you care about your subject is not nearly as important as showing them how much you care about them.
Your non-teacher friends are going to make significantly more money than you. Refuse to measure your happiness or success in dollars. Take comfort in knowing what Dan Meyer states best: many of your friends will worry that their jobs don't really matter to anybody except the family they feed. As a teacher, you will never share this worry. You'll never have to worry that you're insignificant to other people.
Before becoming smitten with a flashy educational technology and quickly implementing it in your classroom, ask yourself the following two questions: "How does this technology improve teaching and learning over the methods I would use without it?" and "How do the drawbacks of this technology compare to the benefits it provides?" If you're not satisfied with either of the answers, discard the technology.