Tips For Young Teachers

Decide To Teach

Do you love sharing ideas?  Do you enjoy spending time with humans who aren’t buying or selling, but just looking?

Teachers are indispensable. We shatter ignorance and challenge stereotypes; we illuminate the unfamiliar.  Our efforts make indecipherable markings on a page become words, become worlds.  

Teachers are the ones who take bewildering quantities -- beyond fingers and toes -- and turn them into numerals, arrange them in equations: balancing, solving, resolving.  We explain prisms, explore paradigms, probe petals, zoom from cells to the cosmos.  We deal in analogies and amoebas; we examine notation, notables, the notorious.  We’re the ones who help add one thing to another; we’re by your side when you first subtract, multiply or divide.

We regularly forge one of the most fundamental and fulfilling relationships known to humankind, that between teacher and student.

Is this the sort of activity that appeals to you?  Then join the granddaddy of all jobs: teaching.  Teachers are members of the world’s preeminent profession, the one that makes every other profession possible.

So, you’ve decided to teach; what then?  You need a principal to hire you.  Here’s how to persuade my kind:

Get The Job

Let’s be clear from the get-go: you will teach, you will not “deliver curriculum.” This unfortunate phrase must be banished before it gets any further hold on gullible, jargon-infatuated minds.  If you want to “deliver curriculum” get a job as a courier for a textbook publisher.

When you apply for a teaching job, send your CV and a cover letter stating clearly what you have to offer.   Do the research and explain what attracts you to that particular school.  Say what motivates you to teach, beyond the unctuous urge to “deliver curriculum.”

Proofread your cover letter and CV with meticulous care.  Error-filled, misspelled materials get tossed in the nearest circular file.  If offered an interview, make sure you find out what makes that school tick.  Ignorance is no excuse; it means no job. 

Prepare The Class

Know your subject matter backwards and forwards.  Make it a magnificent obsession.  The internet makes keeping up in your field ridiculously easy.  Go on line, google a topic and brace for a flood of great ideas.  It takes time to sift out the best approaches and practices, but you’ll never regret the time this takes: do it.

Keep up with popular culture and people in the news.  You can be sure the latest TV shows, films, music and news are filling your students’ minds. You want to hang some new ideas in those minds, right?  Know the hooks.

Why re-invent the wheel?  Ask students who the best teachers are.  Go to those teachers; ask if you can sit in on a few of their classes.  They’ll pretend to be flattered, but they know they’re good; they see it each day in their students’ eyes.  So, watch the best in action.  Better yet, watch the students.  What draws them in? 

You’ll see that master teachers use props, dress the part, pull surprises, re-arrange the desks, make all manner of links between their subjects and the real world.  They do whatever it takes to connect students to subject.

Engage The Students

In your own class, pay attention to what students may be chatting about as you enter.  See if you can relate their topic to your topic.  Go ahead: make a preposterous link.  It sure beats: “Please sit down now and take out your book.”  If you find yourself saying that, get a better opening line.

Show students that you have a plan.  It can be as simple as writing a thought-provoking, open-ended question on the board and saying: “We’re going to answer that question today. ”

Don’t sit down in the chair behind the teacher’s desk.  Perch temporarily on the edge.  Your physical comfort is not paramount, your students’ engagement is.  Move around, then hold still and just use your eyes for a bit.  Make and hold a gesture; your student audience hears words and tone, but seeing physical punctuation helps seal the deal.  Yes, it’s theatre. Learn how to present as an actor would: modulate your voice; vary your pace; change gears.

Learn your students’ names immediately.  Some are difficult to pronounce but you’ll never control, or inspire, a class without knowing them.  Praise your students, by name, for their efforts, not their intelligence. Research shows that kids who are constantly told they’re smart, take fewer risks and make less effort.  Challenge your students or they’ll become complacent and don’t be so brittle as to regard challenging questions from students as challenges to your authority.  You’re the grown-up.  Stay grown.

If asked to explain further, don’t repeat what you just said slower and louder.  Think: How could I put this differently? What’s another angle?  What’s a more immediate, a more effective, analogy for this student, for this class?

Every so often, plan to get carried away.  Let students see your passion.  Be demonstrative for at least a moment or two every class.  Students will get worked up by such displays, even excited.  So what if you’re occasionally exasperating, insistent or agitated?  Students will never forget your intensity; the best will even begin to muster their own. 

You see, great teachers are impassioned impresarios: they promote ideas in the most shameless and unflinching fashion. They get students to dabble their toes in the rippling waters of a subject.  Some students they gently entice to take the plunge, others they just push right in.

Next week: Tips on discipline, testing and how to talk to parents.

Andrew Taylor is the Principal of the Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone, Botswana.  His email address is: principal.map@gmail.com.  Maru-a-Pula’s website is: www.maruapula.org