Advice ... Part 2

Here are a few more lessons I had to learn the hard way during my first year as a teacher.

3. Make friends with your neighbors. Suck up to the teachers in the classrooms near yours. They can easily become allies or enemies, and a lot of it depends on you. Unless the teacher in the next room is also in her first year, she really does know more than you. She may be old, cynical and critical of your teaching abilities when no critique was asked for, and I know that you're full of ideas, optimism and faith in your students. But experience is priceless, and it's the one thing that even the most senile teachers have more of than you. So, if they offer you advice, take it, or, at least, pretend like you will consider it. If the other teachers like you, they can help you out when you run out of #2 pencils and keep an eye out for whoever it is that keeps sticking chewed gum on your door handle. On the other hand, a neighbor who sees you as an arrogant young thing will come over to tell you to keep the noise down every time you show a video and make comments in department meetings about "some of the new teachers" while staring you straight in the face.

4. Have plenty of sponge activities ready to go at a moments notice. A sponge soaks up time. When your planned activities run a little short, and you have an extra five minutes at the end of class, or when you were going to show a video all period, but the VCR doesn't work, you have got to have something to do. Dead, empty time is a very dangerous thing. The best way to maintain your students' good behavior is to keep their hands and minds occupied every minute. You can plan extra activities related to the unit you're working in, but it's best to have some generic type sponges that don't require a lot of materials, especially ones that can be quick or can be stretched out to half an hour if needed. One that I recently learned of that my students liked is a tic-tac-toe game. Draw a big tic-tac-toe board on your white board or overhead. Split the class into two teams, one X, one O. Ask questions or give vocabulary definitions. Students shout out answers. Whichever team gets the right answer first gets to place their mark wherever they want it. Three in a row wins. You can play as many rounds as you can come up with questions for, and you can make it work with any content area.