To The First Year Teacher

At the beginning of every school year, I am always reminded of the first-year teacher version of myself.  With each passing year, she gets further and further away, but her eagerness is deeply implanted in my memory.  To say I was an anal-retentive, first-year teacher is a massive understatement.  Each day I hand wrote a lesson plan complete with approximate lengths of time each segment would take.  I laughed recently as I came across my plan book—the first day of school was broken down, literally, to the minute so as to be sure that there would be no wasted time.

When I look around the room at the faces of first-year teachers each year, I remember how I secretly cried on my way to school that first day out of sheer terror.  I remember how I would leave PLC meetings, take a deep breath at my desk, and proceed to Google search everything my English partners had discussed that I knew nothing about.  I remember feeling like there was no way I would ever keep all the plates spinning at the same time.

I’ve come to learn that plates break.

But, first year teachers, at least the ones similar to me, like to pretend as though they have everything together.  Admission that you don’t makes you feel like a failure.  The result is “safe teaching”—lack of risks, over-planning, and far too much over-analysis of lesson plans.

Here’s what I say to you, fellow anal-retentive, terror-ridden souls (please tell me I’m not the only one!): You bring something to the table.  Maybe it’s your vision for classroom management or your desire to take risks when it comes to instruction.  Maybe you have a knack for inspiring kids to read or have great ideas about how to better incorporate writing into the classroom routine.  Whatever it is, bring it to the table.  No one expects you to have all the answers or to do everything right.  No teacher has all the answers or does everything right (and if they say they do, I suggest you keep a healthy distance).

I’m four years on the other side of that panicky version of myself, and I see now that my best in the classroom is not the same as perfection.  Sometimes a lesson ends 15 minutes before the bell rings which lends itself to a great conversation about books—what I’m reading; what they’re reading.  When I don’t know what someone is talking about now, I ask.  Shocker: it saves a great deal of time.  When the spinning plates start to feel like too much, I hand some off, slow some down, and toss some away.

But periodically I’ll still time crunch a lesson for good measure.  Old habits die hard, you know?

-Molly Finkman
After four years as a ninth grade English teacher in Ankeny, I have made a shift into a literacy interventionist position which is both exciting and nerve-wracking all at once. For me, it’s all about learning, and I often feel as though I have learned as much, if not more, as the students at the end of a given year. In my spare time, I’m usually reading or writing--all healthy, predictable, and cliché pastimes for an English teacher.