So I was thinking today...

...as I drove to work about what matters in my classroom, and how it has changed since I started. Now keep in mind, I'm still pretty much brand new, with 1.33 (repeating) years under my belt so far. Mitigating that small amount of experience is the fact that it took me until I was 25 to get my four-year degree. What I lack in work experience, I make up for in emerging bald spots, so there.

Anyway, getting back to what matters. I thought about what I, as a teacher, deemed important as I struggled through last year, and it goes a little something like this:

1)   Figure out how to fill a class period with activities.

2)   Figure out how to fill a class period with meaningful activities.

3)   Figure out how to fill a class period with learning activities.

4)   Figure out how to b.s. your way through 5 minutes of anarchy at the end of a class, when your best-laid plans fall apart.

5)  Measure what students are learning.

6)  Realize that your measurement tools are crap.  They are broken rulers.  They are warped protractors.  They are politics.

7)  Effectively, efficiently, and proactively assess the meaningfulness of buzzwords as pertains to assessment.

8)  Measure what students are learning without grading.  This is a fun trick, like dancing without legs, or getting drunk off sparkling grape juice.

9)  Find out that re-teaching and repeating are practically antonyms.

10)  Realize, as your voice finally comes back over Christmas break, that classroom management really is as important as they said it would be.

11)  Understand, finally, that you probably weren't the best student, and you should have cut your teachers some slack.  Except for Mr. Johnson; man, that class was pointless.

12)  Realize that running out of ideas in April is a bad place to be.

13)  Realize that the last day of school, not unlike your wedding, college graduation, and first arrest, will go far too fast, and all those super-memorable things you wanted to be your last words, your parting bit of wisdom to your first class, will go unheard once the kids realize you're lecturing them on their last day.

I'm sure that's not all, but I feel like it's fairly accurate.  If you have anything to add to the list, or maybe a list of your own, feel free to share it in the comments.

Oh, oh, wait, 14)  Don't stay up until 2:00 a.m. when you have to get up at 5, simply because, and I quote, "It's May 5th!"

This could be the start of something.

As a first-year middle school teacher last year, I never quite got the hang of lunch. I had heard of this time, this sparse 25-minute period where I would get the chance to hoark down meals that, when I was in middle school, I would avoid like the plague out of my crippling desire to look cool. In my eyes, the coolest kids either disdainfully brought their own lunch in personalized lunch boxes (Cool!), or went a la carte, a phrase none of us had ever heard, but which skyrocketed in popularity after the aggressively attractive girls starting saying it with approximated French accents. I still don't know what it means.

Anyway, lunch was still this anomalous concept to me when I started teaching. As a result of the immense professional stress I placed on myself to be nominated National New Teacher of the Year (a nomination that either doesn't exist or didn't include me...sigh), hunger had become less a bodily urge and more an abstract concept, like nostalgia or peace. It was also similar to those concepts in that I only thought about it when I had too much time on my hands. Those 25 minutes became an extended prep period for me: a time to work on the next day's lesson, grade a few more papers, or do a little online research about why my stomach had passed rumbling and started speaking to me like Audrey II.

Somewhere in November, after my September wedding and October semi-breakdown, my principal approached me with the best, albeit most solipsistic, piece of advice I have ever heard. He told me, probably while mentally cataloging the distressing amount of facial tics his new hire had acquired in the past couple months, "Only do what you can do." He then noticed the tears welling in my eyes and a whole new set of tics emerging as my over-encumbered brain refused to process his philosophical words into something workable. He then simplified it, talking to me like a student: "Tyler," he said, "you can only do what you have time for. Do what you can while you're at work, then leave it at work. You can't be expected to bring work home with you all the time. That's how teachers burn out. I've seen it happen."

I had never heard anything so beautiful, so cleansing. I realized I was no Superman, or even one of the lamer superheroes, like Green Lantern or Cyclops. I was a human being attempting to learn the craft of teaching. I wasn't a seasoned professional, and I wasn't going to look it, no matter how many hours I spent agonizing over the wording of a multiple choice question that needed to appeal to all 35 learning styles. I was a new teacher. I was fallible. I was so hungry I was starting to chew my fingernails for sustenance. This wasn't the way I had to spend my year.

I began to sort things out, and while last year was still pretty hit-or-miss, and there were a couple times when I was ready to just hang it up and be a caveman or ninja, I can say that this year is looking much better. I eat lunch daily, I leave my work at work, and I don't give a rip about who gets the National Greatest Second-Year Teacher of the Year award. I am here for the students, not for the recognition. I am starting to find my groove. I even had enough spare time to start this blog. I hope, if you're a first year teacher somehow stumbling upon this blog from faraway, that some of the information in here will help you and let you know you're not alone.

Because you can only do what you can do.