Successes and Failures of a First Year Teacher

My first year is coming to an end, and I can’t believe it’s over. I feel stunned, happy, relieved, proud, and successful. I’m stunned that it’s actually really over, happy that I survived without falling flat on my face and relieved because I didn’t burn out and I don’t want to quit. I’m proud because despite my inexperience and early failures, in the end I feel I was successful in teaching my students.

One of my biggest worries early on in my teaching was that my students would suffer because of my inexperience. I was really afraid I wouldn’t be able to convey my knowledge to my students. I was worried that I would fail at being the teacher I really wanted to be. Knowing your material is one thing, sharing it with others is another, but having to creatively and energetically teach it to a group of rowdy high schoolers is a completely different thing. Learning how to teach was what my first year was all about.

As I cleaned my classroom today, I looked back through all my folders of lesson plans, worksheets, activities, quizzes and tests that I had created throughout the year. I was so surprised to see the evolution of my work. Early on my lesson plans were so detailed – like a script, word for word I had written out what I wanted to say. Notes, which I had scribbled minutes before class, were written all over them. One thing was crossed out and replaced with another – I was so unsure of what I was doing. My quizzes were not well formatted; Bloom’s Taxonomy was obviously not on my mind as I wrote these quizzes and tests.

As I went through all of these papers, I was reminded of the feeling I had when teaching these books. I felt like I was floundering, I didn’t know in which direction to go with books. I was simply discussing and teaching the basics- the who, what, where, and when. This was probably why I was always struggling for activities and things to do with my classes early on. And most certainly this was why I was not getting out of my students the type of work I wanted – I just didn’t know how.

Thankfully things turned around. My lesson plans grew into outlines of the work I wanted to complete and not completely scripted narratives. They moved from one typed page a day to one typed page for a week. Instead of having to plan out each night what I was going to do the next day I was slowly able to plan for the week. I began to plan on Sunday nights what I hoped to accomplish for the week. Although this always changed as timing of units and activities is another thing that must be learned. The ability to think ahead became a very helpful tool. By my last semester I got as far as planning an entire unit and having an idea of what tests, quizzes and projects or presentations I was going to assign. Because I was always stressing around grade time as to what each assignment was going be weighted as, I also began to think about how much each assignment would be worth. This helped tremendously when it came time to calculate final grades.

Thinking back on the first time I had to give grades I can remember crying – I was frustrated and saddened by the amount of my students who were failing because they had done little to no work. I can recall being told not to take it personally, but I did. I really felt I was failing them or that I was really not calculating grades fairly. Over the year I learned that I needed to constantly bother kids to turn in work, to beg and plead for grades to put into my grade book. My persistency with this was mainly beneficial to them but it also helped me to feel more like I was really trying. I also learned to switch my grades from a grade book to Microsoft excel, which was instrumental in helping me figure out a grading system of my own. Lucky for me I also have a wonderful boyfriend who patiently sat with me and taught me how to weight each grade differently and calculate averages.

So although it took me the entire year, and I did fail at some things along the way, I feel overall I was successful in teaching my students this year. And what I’m really looking forward to, what I’m really excited about in my second year, is being able to use my failures and success to help me more efficiently and thoroughly teach my students next year. That and the summer off!

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