Introduction

Teaching is a profession adorned with platitudes, and when you’re in training, you hear them all. They are well-intentioned, as are the people who are constantly posting them to your social media accounts, but they’re not particularly helpful. Here are a few quotes that elicit a groan whenever we read them. Each is attributed to the people generally recognized as the original source:

• “If you have to put someone on a pedestal, put teachers. They are society’s heroes.” – Guy Kawasaki
• “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." – Henry Adams
• “Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.” – Japanese proverb
• “I’m hot for teacher. I’ve got it bad, so bad. I’m hot for teacher. Whoa.” – Van Halen

All these inspirational quotes are meant to tell you that teaching is an important job, that educating the next generation is a noble goal, but no one is arguing that fact. Everyone knows teachers are important and underappreciated. Here’s something people may not know: Teaching is hard.

Legendary interviewer Terry Gross, host of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, explained it honestly and succinctly in a recent television appearance. She started her professional career as an eighth-grade teacher. “I got my BA in English, with a teaching certificate. I was literally fired in six weeks, for not being able to keep control of a class, or even keep them in a class.” Her teacher training did not prepare her for the realities of a classroom.

Even if you don’t struggle with classroom management, there are plenty of other challenges you’ll face as a first-year teacher. Can you manage your time well? Can you communicate with parents and administrators effectively? Can you make your instructional content interesting enough to hold the attention of a class full of fifth-graders right after lunch?

Once you’re actually in the classroom, the reality of teaching erodes the idealized version most of us have built up in our minds. Things you may have shrugged off at first — the low pay, the increasingly charged politicization of education, a massive at-home workload, and the expectation that you’ll work all hours of the day and night — make you wonder why you chose the path you did. It’s stressful. It’s isolating. It’s hard.

A 2022 study conducted by Merrimack College and EdWeek Research finds “a deep disillusionment of many teachers who feel overworked, underpaid, and under-appreciated.” After surveying more than 1,000 teachers, they found that only 12 percent of respondents were very happy with their jobs, and almost half of those surveyed were planning to quit the teaching profession entirely within the next two years. Why is this happening? Why are people who were so eager to teach leaving in droves so quickly?

We believe that teacher preparation is failing our new teachers. You don’t need platitudes. You don’t need inspirational quotes. You don’t need a 5 percent discount on school supplies purchased during the first week of August if you present a valid school ID (exclusions apply, see store for details). You need help. You need support. You need to know what you’re getting into and what you should do when things go wrong. That’s where this book comes in.

About This Book

Every first-year teacher needs an experienced teacher mentor — someone they can trust, someone who’s made mistakes and learned from them, someone who can give them useful advice. Those people are hard to find. The three of us didn’t have a mentor like that when we started teaching, so we learned the hard way. Over our many years in the profession, we slowly accumulated advice based on our own experiences, the cautionary tales of mistakes we (and others around us) made, and the occasional solid-gold nugget of advice panned from colleagues’ hard-earned wisdom.

Over and over, we found ourselves saying, “If only I’d known that when I was new — it would have saved me so much trouble!” That’s why we wrote this book. There’s no reason that every new teacher should have to build their own bedrock of institutional knowledge and go it alone. We wanted to take all that advice and experience and distill it into one volume so that you are better prepared to succeed right away.

Although we, as a diverse team of three, have a broad knowledge base, we wanted more for this book. We wanted to present a comprehensive view of teaching from many different perspectives and stakeholders in the educational process, so we talked to lots of different people, including

• Prospective teaching candidates, to find out what they were the most nervous about
• Student teachers, to identify pain points and skills they needed to develop
• First-year teachers, who shared stories both inspirational and tragic
• Experienced teachers, who have seen and dealt with it all
• Principals, who explained what they expect from first-year teachers
• District administrators, who provided insight about how they evaluate new teachers
• School staff, who provided insight into the day-to-day operations of a school and how they interface with teachers
• Former students, to figure out what teachers do to make their lives better or worse

We’ve tried to anticipate every important decision or situation you’ll face during your first year teaching so that you’re prepared to respond. You’ll find tons of real-life examples and plenty of those “Here’s what you shouldn’t do” stories (some of them, unfortunately, starring us). This is our way of helping you measure how deep the water is before you dive in.

Foolish Assumptions

We don’t assume much about you in this book, other than that you’re probably involved in — or just finishing — a college or postgraduate educational program. You know all the theory, you can write a lesson plan, and you’re filled to the gills with educational psychology. We aren’t going to revisit any of this well-trod ground. Instead, we’re going to focus on practical advice.

One assumption we don’t make is the grade level you’re teaching or planning to teach. When we were writing, a lot of people asked us, “Is this going to be a book for elementary teachers or secondary teachers?” The answer is: Both. Carol taught elementary school, Flirtisha taught middle and high school, and Mike taught high school and college classes. When we sat down to plan out the book, we discovered over and over again that the same advice applied, regardless of the age group you’re teaching. In some rare cases, some tips are more applicable to students of a specific age, and we call that out when it occurs.

Icons Used in This Book

Here and there, sprinkled in the margins of the book, you’ll find little pictures that point to important parts of the text. Here are the icons we use and what they mean:

These little nuggets of advice can save you valuable time or prevent headaches in the future. It’s sage advice from teachers who have already suffered the slings and arrows of bad decisions.

Think of these warnings as little flags that a minesweeper has placed in the field before you so that you know where you can safely step and where you definitely can’t.

File these things away in your mind because, somewhere down the road, you’ll be glad you did.

We wrote this book as a team, so we generally speak as a consensus. Occasionally, one of us will share a personal anecdote or speak in the first person, so we include one of these icons to indicate which of us is talking.

Beyond the Book

In addition to the pages you’re reading right now, this book comes with a free, access-anywhere online Cheat Sheet that summarizes some of our key advice at a glance. To access this Cheat Sheet, go to www.dummies.com, and type first-year teaching cheat sheet in the search box.

Where to Go from Here

We think the first three chapters provide important context for the rest of the book — they help differentiate this book from most of the other teacher preparation books out there by presenting a realistic picture of what you’re walking into. However, if you want to skip right to the practical advice, you may want to start with Chapter 4 and go from there. We recommend reading through as much of the book as you can before you start teaching, because you may not know what you may not know, you know?

As you read, you may find yourself disagreeing with us here and there, and that’s fine. These strategies worked wonders for us, but our goal with this book isn’t to make you into our disciple. We just want you to think through challenging situations before they actually arise. If that means you come to different conclusions than we do, so be it! You’ll still be forming your own strategies and policies, and that’s what’s most important, after all.

This book is our love letter to you. It has been a joy to work together to distill our lives’ work into something that we hope you find useful in your new journey as a first-year teacher. Feel free to e-mail us at...