I started teaching in 2005, and I thought I knew what I was getting into. Hilarious, correct? I'd had good teachers and role models who tried their best to set me for a career in education. They told me all the same things they probably told you: Yous're here to exist their instructor, not their friend. Don't smiling 'til Christmas. (My least favorite teacher saying e'er.) Cranberry juice helps prevent a urinary tract infection. Simply there are a few things they missed, a few things I wish I'd known back in 2005. …

1. Be careful whom you trust.

Y'all're just out of college and yous weren't in a sorority. You basically hung out with the same x or 12 kids for four years and you were all best friends and there was very fiddling gossip or backstabbing. The real globe is unlike, honey-lamb. Information technology turns out that you can't talk crap near your chief to merely everyone, because even at the best, most supportive schools, spies are everywhere. Brand sure you become some dirt on them before they get whatsoever on you. It's like Machiavelli upwardly in here. And speaking of principals …

2. You're going to get yelled at.

And information technology'southward going to suck.  Sometimes you lot'll deserve it, other times y'all won't. Even though the haters will scoff at this, pedagogy is a fairly high-stress career, for you and for everybody else. People who are stressed take it out on others. Then when your primary makes you redo a painstakingly crafted bulletin board because information technology's not colorful enough, or when your teacher evaluation centers around the fact that your handwriting on the overhead projector is too large, let it gyre like water off a duck'due south back. As well, overhead projector? Don't worry likewise much near learning how to copy transparencies. That's non going to be a problem.

3. You don't got to tell all you know.

You're going to be surrounded by a special breed of Confederate-flag-wearing ignorance for your beginning couple of years. Kids will walk out of science class the day they begin learning about development. Parents volition complain to the (African American) master that there are too many African offset twelvemonth American teachers at the schoolhouse. A kid will decline to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a famous allegory for Christianity, because "Witchcraft's a sin."

Here's the thing, though. You tin't fix all the ignorance. You tin maybe teach them what a linking verb is, and hopefully betrayal them to some literary characters who will expand their perspectives and permit them to run into things with new optics. But you tin't magically transform them into open-minded, intellectually curious people. And don't blame also much of it on the school or the town, either. Turns out, there are ignorant people in the large city too. Don't worry. You'll see.

4. It's OK to screw upward.

Y'all honey these kids, I know. You'll still recall and worry nigh a whole bunch of them more than x years down the road. And you're going to practise things to these kids you love that are unfair and hurtful and wrong, only because yous don't know whatever better. Y'all'll jokingly tease a child about his emphasis and he'll suddenly break down in tears in your class. You lot'll accuse the wrong kid of stealing someone's stuff. Y'all'll telephone call a parent to report some kid'due south classroom misbehavior, and she'll come in the next 24-hour interval with a black center and bruises. You'll miss the bear witness of sexual abuse that you should have caught.

Just you'll be there. However oftentimes you make mistakes and driblet the brawl and practice more harm than good, you're what they've got. And even on your bad days, you will exist a constant, loving, well-intentioned presence in their life, doing the absolute best you tin can to help them. These mistakes are how you learn, and how yous become able to assist a lot more kids in much better means later on down the road. Although you'll yet screw up all the fourth dimension then also.

5. Your heart volition suspension in a thousand means over the next decade or so.

You'll work with kids that you love who are caught in incommunicable situations and you won't be able to save them. By virtue of being a teacher, you lot'll often exist complicit in a system that victimizes kids who don't have a vocalism to speak up for themselves. You will take your piece of work home with you in the form of papers to class and endless anxiety about whether your kids are safe and fed and mentally healthy. When you lot can't do anything else, praying helps … a little. Drinking helps too, but continue in mind that a margarita has over 500 calories, and maybe stick to screwdrivers instead.

And the heartbreak y'all experience doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means that something is wrong with the world. These kids' lives are often broken, and you're doing your absolute, bumbling, never-good-enough all-time to help them pick up the pieces. Knowing that doesn't really help, only it's worth something.

6. It gets and then much improve.

This showtime year, y'all're figuring out who you are as a teacher. You take to have this "adult" persona that you'll accept off similar a corset with a sigh of relief when you get into your car every afternoon. Information technology's exhausting, pretending to have an authority you don't feel your start few years. That part gets so much easier.

Eventually, educational activity will become part of who you are, and you lot'll be able to exist yourself in the classroom. It won't happen correct abroad— it'll take years—but I hope it will happen. Your teacher identity will no longer feel like an ill-fitting costume, it'll be more than like a pair of those fuzzy socks that look like they're made of skinned Muppets. Y'all'll article of clothing that teacher persona more than comfortably, and both y'all and your students volition be better for it.

If my mentors had told me all this, the ensuing decade would however have held some shocks. In that location's just no preparing for the start fourth dimension you catch a kid getting amorous with himself during a movie well-nigh Helen Keller. But this would accept been a good outset.

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