New Teachers, Don’t Fall for These 3 Pieces of Bad Advice

If history holds, the first day of school will welcome something like 300,000 new teachers to classrooms for the first time. For most of these educators, the summer has probably been spent in a state of heightened preparation. Whether fresh out of college or coming later from a second career, heading back to school as the one in charge is daunting. Thinking back to my own first year of teaching left me with two overarching feelings: excitement and terror. In relatively equal proportions.

Advice to new teachers is legion, but not all guidance is created equal. Let me try to cut through the noise a little bit. I remember being a new teacher; I know that your time is precious. But neither can I hear the words “good advice” without remembering that old adage about “good intentions.”

People mean well. But sometimes they have things just a little backward.

Let me try something different here. Instead of offering advice, I’d like to bust a few pieces of bad advice. My career stretches back in time—through TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook to the very dawn of social media, before most students even brought a phone to class. I’ve had 19 wonderful first days of school. But I’ve been given some bad advice along the way, and now I advise new teachers to ignore these pointers.

3 Tips New Teachers Need to Ignore

1. Don’t smile until Christmas. This one is an oldie but goodie—it’s the very first thing I remember hearing ahead of my very first first-day-of-school. Good and wrong, to be clear. The last thing students need from their teacher is a dour, angry face looming at the front of the room every day. I teach eighth-grade math, so I know that school can’t always be fun. It does, however, need to be a place that consistently fosters joy. If our education is not, at root, joyful, then we are missing the mark.

Putting your best frown forward to the children in your charge is a sure recipe for failure. Or, at least, it will doom your room to something like misery for everyone inside. Children are funny and fun. Let them entertain you. Maybe Aaron Burr’s advice in Hamilton is something we all need to hear: “Talk less, smile more.” I’m pretty sure the students would agree.

2. Students don’t need to hear about your life. I was being observed by an instructional coach once, and she pulled me aside after class to give me a quick pep talk. Good lesson, she said. But don’t use your family in your real-life examples. The students don’t care about any of that.

I was shocked to hear this ridiculous advice. I have always felt that one of my superpowers as a teacher is that I go home to my four children. One of them is older than the students I teach, two are younger, and one is the exact same age. Meaning that even as a middle-aged man, I get some free buy-in and relatability with my students—they can ask me questions about my kids and I can answer, and they can see that maybe I’m not as out of touch as I might appear. Even if I am strangely excited about math.

Your superpower might be that you are obsessed with K-pop or Taylor Swift. Tell the students. Or that you’re from some other state or country or that you love to travel. Tell the students. Or that you once played piano in a country music band. This is also me, and I always make sure to tell the students. Any chance for the children in your room to humanize you will make them that much more able to hear you when the lessons get going.

3. Spend the first week just getting to know them. This one is a newer hit, but equally goofy. It feels like a product of the postpandemic world, as if children are so fragile that they need to be eased into school like a warm bath.

Should you start slow? Sure. Should you expect the first week to be chaotic, busting your perfectly written summer plans into a million little pieces? Absolutely. But if you want to spend a week just hanging out and getting to know some teenagers, you should have been a camp counselor. Among a thousand other things, the kids do actually come to school to learn. If you don’t give them some decent subject matter in that first week, they’re going to think you don’t have much in the way to offer them.

The assignments don’t have to be difficult. They don’t even have to be for a grade. But you need to give out some legitimate work, directly related to your course. The students expect it. More important, even if they may not be able to admit it, they probably want it.

One Last Thing

Those are the big three pieces of misguided advice—I could think of many others, and I’m sure every veteran can, too. Maybe the best thing we can do in the early days of school is to warn the new teachers we know about the bad advice they might be hearing. If we can help them avoid mistakes we might have made, so much the better.

In closing, I’m going to switch gears and affirm some of the best advice I ever got. Long ago, a series of wise counselors told me that the most important thing about the first days of school is to have a plan, a second plan, and a backup to that second plan. Meaning, dead time in the room is not your friend. Be ready for something that you thought would take the whole period to fly by; be ready for another thing to be a total bust and require an immediate change of pace.

Be ready to fill that space with meaningful work, stories about you and your life, and maybe a smile or two. Keep that up for 180 days or so, and you’ll be just fine.