Some of your most regrettable moments as a teacher can come from earnestly applying what you learned in training.
Why?
Because it’s easy to over-apply good teaching principles to the point where they become bad teaching principles.
To illustrate, here’s a story I’m not particularly proud of.
I believe in setting high expectations for students.
That’s not a controversial statement; setting high expectations for students is a good piece of teaching advice. It’s also common wisdom, reinforced in many teaching programs and professional development.
It was in the spirit of setting high expectations that I brought in a book of logic problems for my language arts students. These were logic exercises one of my teachers had introduced to me as a student. There was something about reading these passages and narrowing down the possible answers that had stretched my brain in a way I’d found addictive. I was excited to share them with my students.
After explaining the methods and working on a few problems in class, I assigned one of the problems for homework.
But when the students came in the next day, almost nobody in the class had done it.
My reaction to this was to give a long speech, free-styling on the topics of grit and mental toughness and goal-oriented behavior.
It felt like an unremarkable speech that was meant to communicate high expectations, and—if we’re being honest—a way to unload my frustration that nobody had bothered to do the assignment.
Except that at some point, a shy girl near the back of my classroom started quietly crying in her seat.
I sensed that something had gone wrong, so I asked the students to write me a note about why they didn’t do the assignment.
The girl who had been crying wrote me a letter about how both of her parents worked in factories. They were unhappy with their jobs and wanted more for her. One of her worst fears was not achieving above and beyond what they had been able to achieve.
She felt like I was telling her that this was where she was headed because she hadn’t done this assignment—and she believed it.
This was never my intention, of course. My intention was to set high expectations. But it didn’t land that way.
Afterward, I reread the logic problem and tried to walk my students through it.
It turned out that there was a confusing step in this particular problem.
The kids had not done these type of logic problems before, so they didn’t know that this one was not well-written.
And I just assumed that every logic problem in this book was going to be equally well written, so I hadn’t previewed the problem before assigning it.
But this problem actually was confusing. It really was not a test of anyone’s grit or go-get-itness or response to a challenge.
It was just they got thrown off by one confusing step that could be interpreted a whole bunch of different ways.
Who knows what percentage of my students would have done their homework if the problem was more understandable. Maybe not that many. But this was, possibly, the least doable problem in the book.
What’s the takeaway here?
Educators spend a tremendous amount of time comparing their own unedited footage to other people’s highlight reels. But the truth is, you’re going to have bad moments trying to do good things as a teacher.
Part of it is just a numbers game.
You teach 180 days in a school year.
You’re going to have a bad moment or two.
Planning and teaching a great 45-minute lesson does not use all of the same skills and personality traits as walking into a classroom 180 days a year, teaching the full day, going back and doing it again the next day and the next year.
The endurance factor of teaching specifically requires you not to treat your job like a highlight reel.
In fact, the longer your teaching career is, the more non-highlight-reel moments you’re going to have.
Most classroom issues are not caused by you not caring about the kids enough or you not knowing whether you should come to class with a well-planned lesson.
The issues are more likely to be something like one of these things:
- Your teaching task treadmill is turned up too high and you need practical steps to turn it down.
- You are looking for a concrete system to streamline your lesson planning time.
- Your emotional rubber band often feels stretched right to its breaking point, and you’re looking for some way to manage it so that you don’t snap or cry or yell at the kids unnecessarily.
- You want to shorten your learning curve and avoid having to learn everything the hard way. And when possible, you want to do this at a sprint. You don’t have time for a marathon. You don’t have patience for a journey.
The Maintain and Stay Sane Program for Teachers is a series of bite-sized but meaty courses meant to help you up your game in one targeted area of teaching in as little as a week.
All courses include self-paced lessons that are always tightly edited to clock in under fifteen minutes each, guided actionable steps that should take you anywhere from ten minutes to an hour to complete, and comprehensive workbooks for each section, including as much done-for-you work as possible.
This can’t guarantee you’ll never have another regrettable moment in your classroom. But it can help you get closer to the teacher you’ve always hoped to be, starting today.