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.

Teachers actually don’t need to be great at everything.

Teachers need to be adequate at everything. Then they need to be good at the things that most affect their students.

And then they should strive to be great at a few little things that give them that extra spark as teachers.

When I was a fourth grade teacher, I remember sitting in the teacher’s lounge and hearing a teacher tell this story.

A kid was misbehaving in her class, and she called his grandmother. She called right from class, right in front of all of the other students, and told the grandmother what the kid was doing.

The grandmother said, let me talk to him.

The teacher put the kid on the phone, and in front of the whole class, the kid was just saying, yes, ma’am. Uh, yes. Yes, ma’am.

The whole class could hear the grandmother yelling at him through the phone.

The kid put down the phone and goes back to his seat, and whatever he was doing that day, he sure never did that again.

Processing an overwhelming amount of advice is an important skill as a teacher.

It feels so important to get this right.

And much of the advice you receive is pretty solid.

But not all advice is worth taking right now, and some is not worth taking at all.

Before my first year of teaching, a veteran teacher told me: Whatever you do, stay out of the teacher’s lounge!

She said it would be full of negative teachers, gossiping about the kids, gossiping about each other, and probably gossiping about me as soon as I left the room.

That veteran teacher’s advice ended up being. . . well. . . not that far off.

That being said, I don’t think that the advice about staying out of the teacher’s lounge is meant to be taken literally. When people give you that advice, they’re actually using “the teacher’s lounge” as a shorthand for something else.

That something is toxic negativity.