Hey first years! What to do this summer (besides sh*t your pants)

Just kidding about your pants. Relax! Be cool. There is plenty of time for worries later! Seriously, it is impossible to prepare completely for your first year teaching, and the best thing you can do is approach with a clear and refreshed frame of mind. You just graduated college, most of you. Give yourself a break! And don’t let Ben scare you too much. Yeah, teaching your first year is really tough, especially where you are going, but it’s going to suck no matter what you do this summer. So relax a little! Honestly, you don't even know enough about who you are as a teacher to plan good lessons yet. And that’s okay. Enjoy your summer while you can. Do what you need to do for Teacher Corps but try to enjoy your time with classmates and us second years. Remember, you take them for granted now, but you will not be seeing most of these wonderful people too much once the regular school year begins.

My other advice, aside from everything you will hear 1000 times this summer about planning lessons and preparing your classroom discipline, is to get into your classroom as early as you possibly can. Chances are, you may inherit a room that has had a lot of turnover in the past. Teachers come and go, and they leave all kinds of useless and forgotten crap behind. You may have 15-year old computers or a random assortment of yellowed workbooks no one has looked at in 20 years, plus 12 popcorn poppers stacked in your cupboard. You really never know until you look in your room. It may take some work to get it halfway organized and uncluttered, that’s all I’m saying. Most schools will not give you enough time to deal with this, because veteran teachers already have their rooms set up they way they want, from the year before. And if you plan to make posters or anything else to put in your room, try to get that ready in July, before you move to your site, so when you do get there, you have time to clean up and throw away and organize.

Further musings on the topic of organization: One of the mundane struggles of the teaching life is the enormous amount of paper you have to shuffle through on a daily basis. Frankly, if you are anything like me, you probably have no idea how to organize all this until at least halfway through your first year—and by that time, you are too busy and burned out to care about a little clutter. My desk was an absolute, primordial mass of papers piled on top of each other that grew bigger and messier throughout the year. I would actually tell students not to leave homework papers on my desk because I might not find them! Aside from homework, quizzes, and other assignments you take up, which of course piles up alarmingly quickly if you let it, you will receive endless announcements, lists of students absent for various and sundry reasons, memoranda about many useless topics, lunch menus, calendars, and well, you get the picture. Personally, I recommend an accordion-style file folder for carrying student work back and forth between home and school and the local McDonald’s—wherever the inspiration to grade papers strikes you. For all the other crap, you’re on you own. If you are the type for it, you might try asking a mentor teacher at your school (if you can find one!) what papers are important to keep and how to organize them.