The Best Advice I Ever Received as a Teacher

Contest entries, spring 2006

Read the winning entries from Steve Feld, Colleen Kilian, and Barbara Moran.

Barbara Moran

My first year of teaching I had four sophomore English classes--one general, a "slow" class, two college prep, and also a junior general class. I learned quickly that that meant four preps!

It also meant little sleep. Coming home from school around five o'clock after staying to mimeograph (Yes, mimeograph!) materials for the next day, I would eat supper and fall asleep soon after. Conscience would wake me in the middle of the night—two or three or four o'clock—so I would get up to work on lesson plans. Maybe it was printing vocabulary words on strips of construction paper to staple above the blackboard (Yes, a blackboard!) or reread the chapter in Silas Marner the curriculum required. Perhaps I'd catch another hour or two before rising to meet the day.

My classes were diverse. The city sent a mix of ethnicities, and there were probably about 130 or more of them, the "slow" class bringing down the total. This number included a girl with cerebral palsy who was blind and brought her Brailler to class to take notes, a noisy process of click-clacks that distracted me and the other students. That was the year I learned to keep track of girls who had to go to the restroom more than once a month for their "female troubles." It was also the year I learned, from the assistant principal, that keeping the nephew of the basketball coach in class to make up a test during a pep assembly was not a politically correct decision.

Between the physical and emotional stress of the new job, I was a wreck. College had been easier than this; so had student teaching. I went to the youngest woman in the English department to ask how she managed to always look so bright and perky and popular with her students. Here's what she said: "Save yourself for the classroom."

I pondered that message, and though it was hard, I managed my time and efforts so there was a bit left for me read a book for myself, attend a concert, talk to family on the phone. The second year I taught, although in a new school and a new city, was half as arduous as the first. And I now had that mantra to recite to myself when I felt the floodwaters reaching my chin.

Those who teach English soon realize that they are trying to fill a black hole of literacy ignorance. We must look for shortcuts and ways to work effectively without sacrificing our very souls. We must learn to share our best methods and become a cadre of colleagues who work for the betterment of all. We must learn not to grade papers on our vacations. We must allow ourselves to have hobbies. We must learn that to give to the classroom we must first take something for ourselves. We must save ourselves for the classroom.