Cranium Diaries Post #1

Insight from a Third-Year Teacher

Your first year of teaching is all about surviving. You are trying to stay above water. The goals are to not miss any important deadlines, prove yourself as an educator, try to get home by 8 PM and teach and encourage your first group of students through June.

Your second year of teaching is SO much better. It has to be. There is nothing like your first year. You still find yourself in a scramble many weeks and months of the year, but things start to become a little more familiar.

Your third year of teaching (it’s only my 5th week into it) seems to supply the first moment to catch your breath and reflect on what just happened in the last two years of your life. Obviously, I realize I still have so, so much to learn (about twenty or thirty more years full), but I also recognize I have accumulated a few skills and tactics of teaching that I’ll carry with me for the rest of my career. Most of these concepts are ones teachers never verbalize to one another or, more importantly, to new teachers. They are the sort of things you must learn on your own as you experience your own classroom full of students and everyday challenges. I’m not saying these are infallible, perfect, works-for-every-classroom concepts, but what I am saying is I think they’re worth listening to if you’re a new teacher because they just might work for your classroom too. In fact, many of these may only work for my classroom because they mesh well with my personality and teaching style. Some of these ideas I learned in college, others I picked up from veteran teachers or my extraordinary BTSA mentor teacher and the rest I accumulated through trial and error or hours spent staring into space while sitting in the middle of my classroom on Saturday afternoons. Nonetheless, these are all ideas I have found to be successful even in Year Three of 2nd grade. I consider these to be treasure keeping me sane among my adorable seven and eight year old friends.

This is going to be a series of posts as I think of the daily lifesavers I couldn’t live without and I wish someone had been able to verbalize to me a few years ago.

#1 Kids love responsibility. They want to know they can be counted on. They crave feeling important, successful and talented. I used to have a handful of classroom jobs (messenger to the office, paper passer-outers, light and door monitors etc.) I assigned and changed them weekly. I noticed another teacher’s job chart last year and realized she had double the amount of jobs I did. So I started thinking… why can’t every kid have a job every week? There are plenty of things second graders can accomplish on a daily basis… why aren’t I assigning more responsibility to my success-seeking students? So I did just that. Now I have sink monitors (cleaning the sink area after art etc.), chair monitors (those darn things can be weapons if they’re left out in the wrong place), gardener (watering our class plants), pencil sharpeners and many other tasks to employ twenty-three munchkins. Some of the jobs are silly tasks I was doing myself on a daily basis… why not hire my students to do so? No matter the task, we feel successful, needed and mighty responsible no matter what week it is.

#2 The sound of a hand cranked or electric pencil sharpener absolutely drives me up the wall in the classroom. Most teachers ban the act while they are teaching, but there’s something so unnecessary about the extra noise above the conversing students, clicking keyboards and scraping lead. Luckily I found out early on how much this irritated me enabling me to quickly seek out a solution to this newly acquired pet peeve. Who knew? Since week two of my teaching career, there are two extremely important construction paper covered coffee cans sitting on the back counter of my room. Once is labeled dull and the other, sharp (with corresponding graphics, of course). During the day, students are to drop their dull or broken pencils into the appropriate container in which case (and only if the first step is completed) they are allowed to get a new, sharp pencil and quickly find their way back to the task they were tackling. (I created the second rule after my first year of teaching once I learned students simply liked to obtain as many pencils as they could, leaving two empty cans at the end of each school day.) What if a student looses a pencil? Mean Ms. Boyer makes them “pay” me a ticket (I’ll get to tickets in a later post) because no one has actually ever witnessed a pencil growing arms and legs and making their way away from where they were left. No wasted time sharpening pencils, no hideous noise, continuous sharp pencils (thanks to the pencil sharpeners) and one calm teacher. Problem solved.