The blog post advises teachers on preparing for the new school year, emphasizing the stress and overwhelm of teacher work days just before students return. It suggests strategies for managing these days effectively:
1. **Find Quiet Time:** Due to the intense stimulation and information overload during teacher work days, the post encourages taking breaks to decompress, such as having lunch alone or closing the door to process information calmly.
2. **Establish a Note-Taking System:** Recommends using digital notes stored in Google Drive for easy access and organization. For those who prefer handwriting, suggests using a multi-subject notebook to categorize notes by type of meeting.
3. **Value Your Own Ideas:** Advises new teachers not to feel pressured to adopt every suggestion from professional development speakers. Encourages confidence in their own teaching methods and creativity, even if different from colleagues or speakers.
4. **Don't Rush Everything for Day One:** Emphasizes that not everything needs to be perfect by the first day of school. Lists practical priorities like printing emergency forms, preparing for substitutes, setting up attendance systems, and planning initial community-building lessons.
Overall, the post reassures teachers that it's okay to take time to adjust and prioritize their own teaching style and classroom readiness over external pressures.
Welcome back to my Beginner Teacher Series! The time to start preparing for the new school year has begun. With less than a month away, the pressure and anxiety of getting curriculum, materials, decor, etc is increasing by the day. If you are working at a school like mine, you will have a few teacher work days to plan and prepare for students to return. I find these days to be some of the most exhausting days of the year. It’s information overload. My brain simply cannot retain all of the information, but I have to. I’ve been around the block enough now to know how to best approach these teacher work days and will now take this opportunity to depart some wisdom onto you so that you don’t leave these days second-guessing your career before students have even stepped into your classroom.
Back-to-school teacher work days are extremely stimulating. You are surrounded by people the entire time and you are getting so much information at once. I have left these days in tears because I am overstimulated and just need time to process. It’s okay to take lunch alone, close your classroom door, and breathe. It’s okay if you don’t want to talk to people and you just want to decompress before you have your next meeting.
As much as I love using my brand-new pens and notebooks, I have to take digital notes in meetings to know exactly where to find information later on. I recommend making a folder in your Google Drive called “Meeting Notes” and starting a Google Doc for each type of meeting you attend. Make a Google Doc template for your notes so you only have to make a copy of the template each time. If you are someone who needs to handwrite notes, consider getting a multi-subject notebook so you can organize notes into categories such as PD, school-specific, team meetings, etc.
As a new teacher, you are going to hear from paid professionals, such as keynote speakers, about what works for them and how to “reimagine” your lessons and engage students in different ways. If you are a first-year teacher, feel free to take notes and grab some ideas from them. However, you do not have permission to panic or toss out everything that you learned in college and student teaching because this guy from a teacher PD start-up is coming in and telling you that the best way to structure a unit plan is by using a fancy grid and requires endless amounts of planning ahead. Chances are, your keynote speaker or PD professional hasn’t set foot in their own classroom in quite some time.
You are allowed to try out your own ideas. Just because the teacher next to you, your department head, or teacher bestie isn’t doing exactly what you are doing, does NOT mean your ideas are not worthy. You are allowed to be creative! Professional development and training are great for getting ideas and trying new things, but ditching what you know 4 days before the kids come because some guy named Steve told you to isn’t needed or good practice.
My last piece of advice is something that my cousin Jodi told me before my first day of teaching. She left a comment on a Facebook post that said “The best piece of advice that I have is that it doesn’t all have to be ready for the first day.” If you think about it, your students aren’t going to know that your classroom decor isn’t exactly what you want it to be on day 1. They aren’t going to know that you haven’t had time to make cute covers for your LMS classroom page yet. They won’t know that your entire first unit isn’t perfect, that you don’t know what you are doing past week 2, and that you still haven’t figured out XYZ.
The most important things to do before the kids come are the following:
Print emergency forms
Make a sub-binder
Know how to take attendance. Print out class rosters and be prepared for them to change.
Prep your first week or two of lessons
Prep a pre-assessment
Create a questionnaire you will use later on
Do you have a job?
What does your after-school routine look like?
What excites you about this school year?
Why did you take Spanish?
How do you get to school?
Well, there you have it. As you head back to school and have your teacher work days, remember that you are a good teacher with great ideas that deserve to be tried, regardless of what the person on stage tells you. I hope your back-to-school season is filled with quiet moments, time to lesson plan, and doesn’t have keynote speakers who haven’t taught since 2014 😉
