Introduction: If I can do it, you can do it

tldr: The first two years are difficult for everyone. Even colleagues can be a challenge. With mentorship, there is room for growth and advancement in the education profession.

The first two years of teaching are simply SURVIVAL. My own experience was no different than many others’.

I had always wanted to teach. I never played with dolls the way you were supposed to, by making a little family and playing house. Instead, I would line them up in neat rows and teach them lessons in English and history.

My student teaching experience in a middle school was brutal. It was so stressful that I would throw up many mornings before I went to the school. My supervising teacher was callous and uncaring toward me, toward the students, and, as I later learned, toward her own children.

The way the program was supposed to work was that you were to student teach for six weeks. The first week you were supposed to do one class, the second week two classes, etc., until you were teaching a full day. That is not the way mine went.

The first week I was there, the supervising teacher said, “Okay, starting next week you will teach all day, all six classes. This is a break for me. And, by the way, I am way behind on grading,” and she gave me a stack of papers to grade that was two feet high. Last, but not least, she told me that I would occasionally need to babysit her children on the weekends! I was waiting tables at the time and could make up to $100 in tips on a good night. For a 3–4 hour evening of babysitting, the supervising teacher would give me $1. But I babysat because I really wanted to teach, and I wanted a good recommendation.

After I graduated, my first teaching job was in a high school in a rural area of northern Indiana. When you are a beginning teacher at the high school, you get freshmen. I taught five classes of freshman English. For whatever reason, a disproportionate amount of my students were boys.

I was also doing the drama productions—one each semester. For a couple months each semester, I was up at the school for three extra hours a night practicing and rehearsing the play.

The English department was a disaster. There were six people, all of us very different personalities. Kate was really a French teacher who wanted to teach French but had settled for English. Nevertheless, she was a very good teacher. She was seasoned, had lived in France, loved basketball, was divorced, and loved French wine. Leonard, a beginning teacher, was quiet, a bit afraid of his own shadow, hesitant to voice an opinion, and very diplomatic in anything he did say. Joyce really liked to sit in a chair, was a bully, had two children, and talked about how the students were “empty buckets” and we had to “fill them up.” Jean was a musician, a singer, and believed in a very academic approach to literature. She told me that no one could live without knowing Shakespeare. I said, “I reckon people DO live without knowing Shakespeare,” whereupon Jean burst into tears. Andrew was the fifth teacher. He was an arrogant pseudointellectual—everything was beneath him. He considered himself an aspiring writer as yet undiscovered. A renaissance man without the charm or experience. The rest of us peons in the department were to be merely tolerated, if not outright disliked.

And then there was me. Unafraid to voice an opinion, I enjoyed students—especially the outliers in the room: the badly behaved, the gifted, the unusual, the shy. I was unintimidated by the disruptive boys (I had three brothers) and the disrespectful girls. And truly, I was not a very good teacher when I started. I am surprised that they did not fire me!

Something I was good at was producing the school plays—good enough to cause some jealousy in the department, anyway. One year, Joyce turned me in to the legal department of the company that printed the scripts for the theater productions because she said I had violated copyright laws. Joyce had been doing the theater productions prior to me but did not want to keep doing them. However, after I took over, Joyce did not like the success I was having. Yes, professional jealousy is real, and it can contribute to a negative work environment.

In my second year, the school was vandalized. They broke the windows in the English office. When the police came, they said, “Look what they did to that desk,” and pointed to Joyce’s desk. With little charity in my voice, I told them that her desk always looked that way.

The principal my first year was ineffective. He actually took my classroom away from me midyear because a teacher (whose family owned the bank) had decided that she needed two classrooms in which to teach—mine and hers. The principal gave her mine and put me in the bleachers in the gym. After a week of this, I went into him and told him that if he did not give my room back to me, I would go to the school board meeting. I told him I thought they would not look kindly on one teacher having two classrooms and me having none. I got my room back. My second year, we had a new principal who was terrified of the students. He would lock himself in his office, come out at lunch and get the mail, and then lock himself back in his office until the end of the day.

The students were in a rural area where education was not highly valued. People there went to school because it was required. Among the many students I had, there were a couple students who came to class drunk, one who was working for the pharmacy and helping herself to the pills, one who crawled under the desks to look up girls’ skirts, and one who had a nearly perfect memory. He remembered everything I ever said and could quote it back exactly as I had said it. My point is that not every student had negative behavioral issues. However, I had one class that was so behaviorally difficult that I was never sure how I would keep them in line for that 45 minutes every day. Some classes are such a mix of very difficult personalities that it can feel like there are no strategies that will work.

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