A Letter to A First-Year Teacher

As regard the specifics, I don’t know what advice I can give you or what I can tell you to be prepared for.  I feel that my experience in Teacher Corps has been a singular one, from which it is hard for an outside observer (or myself even) to draw any lessons.  We annually recruit fewer teachers for the Delta schools; we annually place fewer teachers in rural districts; and rarely do such a lack of oversight and sheer managerial incompetence coincide to produce the latitude in which I had to operate (operate, that is, in a rural Delta district).

What advice I can give is relatively simple to say but nearly impossible to carry out:  Find a way to forgive your students on a daily basis.  The biggest mistake I made during my second year was to turn my classes into a perpetual power struggle: to prepare to battle a select group of malcontents; to beat them and to assert my dominance.  This view—and this behavior—by a teacher is necessary, to a degree: if you cannot wrap your head around the hierarchy of power in the classroom then you will never accomplish anything as a teacher.  But at the same time, this maintenance of dominance is both intoxicating and exhausting.  It’s easy to take too far, and it wears on you both as a teacher and as a human being.

I have forgotten until recently that some of the chief virtues of Western Civilization are humility, forgiveness, and patience.  Until I embraced a (limited) humility, I was not able to view my worst students as human beings.  Until I embraced forgiveness, I was able to do naught but disdain my worst students.  Until I embraced patience, I was not able to stretch my humility and forgiveness beyond a day’s length.

None of this absolves a student from either his own personal responsibilities or the ones he accrues in your classroom.  But—in my experience at least—until I embraced these virtues, I established responsibilities as stumbling blocks for my students to trip over and not as checkpoints on the way to adulthood.

I guess my advice is to find a way to approach each day anew, as trite as that sounds.  Understand a student’s past weaknesses and failures, hope for him to succeed today, dispose of your anger or hatred when you leave the building.