If you’re like me, you will never forget that wild year. The first year of teaching. The days when you came home on top of the world. The world that you were changing. You had the kids in the palm of your hand. They loved you, you loved them, and everything was apple trees and sunshine.

Then there were the other days. The days when nothing worked. Not even the pencil sharpener. You ran off the wrong set of copies and the principal stopped by to watch. You marked the wrong kid absent and her mom freaked out. In your room. In front of your class.

Ah yes, the first year of teaching. The ups, the downs, the loneliness, the stress. It’s no wonder that many of our young teachers leave the classroom within their first five years, given the fact that we’re the only profession in which first year practitioners have essentially the same responsibilities as thirty-year veterans. Fortunately, this problem has been recognized and smart people have started to address it. Studies have shown that effective teacher induction programs can dramatically reduce new teacher attrition.

But I want to do something a little different here. Something that I hope will raise the awareness of what brand-new teachers experience as they begin their careers.

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1. My students are working harder than they’ll ever work for the rest of their lives. Think about it. A middle-aged man, easily twice your size, gives you something difficult to do first thing in the morning. You struggle with it, finally figure out how to do it, and then he takes it away from you and gives you something else that’s difficult to do. This goes on all day. And he promises to keep making the work harder every day until mid-June. How many of us would tolerate a job like that?

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By Tom

What do you need to know in order to teach kindergarten? Probably the alphabet and some basic phonics, right?  And some numbers, at least up to about twenty. You’d also have to know some science, I guess. Like where rain comes from and why dogs can’t talk. And then there’s social studies. Someone might ask you about police and fire officers, so you should probably understand those jobs, at least in principle.

So on the whole, most people over the age of about seven have probably mastered the content knowledge required to teach kindergarten. But does that mean they could teach kindergarten?

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Posted for CSTP blogger KIM:

In one of my previous lives, I really was a Russian language prisoner-of-war interrogator. Forget everything you ever learned in the movies about interrogating POW’s; it’s really nothing like that. Interrogation involves the art and skill of reading body language and using basic psychology to get the information we need. Two “techniques” are Fear Up and Fear Down. Simply translated, this means that I either build up their fear or dispel it to achieve the desired effect of cooperation.

At the outset, 9th graders might seem a little different than your basic Soviet soldiers, but really, they’re all just teenagers or young adults who aren’t quite in as much control of their lives as they would like to be.

Because the word “interrogation” has negative connotations, it might seem out of place in the public school classroom. Why would there be a need to interrogate or question an adolescent?

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