Advice For Young Teachers (A Satire)

When I was a new teacher, I was glad to hear the wisdom of seasoned teachers who could give me valuable guidance based on their years of experience in teaching. Having spent eighteen years in the classroom, I am now happy to offer advice to younger teachers. Here are some things you can do to make your school year fabulous:

• Don’t smile before Thanksgiving. Better yet, don’t smile until Christmas. In general, just don’t smile much at all, or the students won’t take you seriously.
• Post a list of at least ten classroom rules. Make the rules your primary focus, and never extend grace for any broken rules.
• Ignore your own health and well-being. Good teachers burn themselves out for their students.
• Work obsessively to please everyone. Your number one goal should be to keep everyone—your students, all the parents, your co-teachers, and the school administration—happy all the time.
• If you are a new teacher, you must do everything that the previous teacher did. Never mind if she loved messy science projects, and your strengths lean more toward English and History. You must do all those science projects, or you will be a terrible teacher.
• Bulletin boards and classroom décor are the most important thing. You cannot be a good teacher without utilizing all the latest ideas on Pinterest. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t even looked at the math book before the first day of school, as long as you have a great classroom theme.
• Having the perfect system and procedure for everything will guarantee your success. Children are similar to robots, you know. You program them right and they’ll do exactly what you want.
• Don’t follow the curriculum very much. It’s uncreative of you to use those ideas and lesson plans in the teacher’s manual. Good teachers come up with all their own ideas. After all, those curriculum writers probably didn’t do their research very well, and what do they know about education anyway?
• Make sure you walk through all the other teachers’ classrooms and carefully compare yourself with them. Be sure your room looks nicer than anyone else’s.
• Avoid asking other teachers for help or advice. You’ll be a big bother to them, plus you wouldn’t want to risk appearing ignorant and needy.

Just follow these simple steps, and you will be sure to have a successful school year!