I ran across the following tweet today and had some fun reading the replies:
I thought most of the replies would be related to teaching, but they were more life-centered. Some of my favorite replies were:
“Never go into teaching, find something else to do”
“Go to law school”
“Invest in Bitcoin”
“Don’t date Michelle”
We have all wished for a time machine at least once or twice, right? I’m sure everyone has some giant mistakes they wish they could erase (yes, I know, bad experiences build character and make you stronger, blah blah blah, cliche, platitude). Honestly, I would rather go back and do-over some of the dumb things I’ve said or the awkward social interactions I have caused in my life. About once a week I will be silently lying in bed trying to fall asleep and my brain will recall a time of supreme awkwardness from 30 years ago and I will audibly say “Jesus” and get a shiver of shame down my spine.
Since time machines don’t exist (right?), the next best thing I could do was try to think of what advice I would tell a teacher at the beginning of their career. What do I wish I knew back then, or maybe what did I actually know, but never internalized it and put it into action? I tried to boil it down to the 3 most important things I could tell myself that could make the next 20 years more enjoyable. Here’s what I came up with:
1) Max out your salary as soon as possible.
Teachers are not paid what they are worth, but they have ways of making more money and being guaranteed a raise (almost) every single year. In most districts teachers are paid based on a salary schedule negotiated by your union and the school district. Here is the current salary schedule for my district:
When you are hired as a first year teacher you start at Step 1 (year one of teaching) and are most likely in the “BA + Cred” column, meaning you have earned a Bachelor’s Degree and have your teaching credential. This guarantees you a 10-month salary of $66,547 before taxes in my district. If you never do any continuing education or professional development during your career, you will stay in this income column for your entire career. This means that over 20 years you will earn a total of $1,639,898 (not including raises negotiated by the union, which in my district is usually about 1.5-3% per year), which sounds great, but you will spend most of that on basic living expenses.
So, how do you move over to the higher columns? Well, to get one column over you must complete 45 graduate credits of continuing education, or about 15 college level courses at 3 units each. This takes time, and many teachers do this work over the summer while they are not in the classroom. In order to get all the way over to the highest column you need to complete 75 units of graduate credits, or 25 3-unit courses. Obviously, this takes a significant amount of time and effort. Is it worth it?
Let’s go aggressive and assume you take your first three years to earn 45 units, then another year to get to 60, then another year to get to 75. This means you will be at max salary starting year 6. You are now making $88,409 per year instead of $76,949, or an additional $11,460 per year! Granted, you need to pay for the college courses that you are taking (which cost anywhere from $65-$200 per unit), but the return on that investment only gets better over time. Take a look at the BA + Cred column again. Notice how your salary stays flat in certain places? For example, your salary does not change at all from year 8 to year 15. Now look at the 75 column. That rarely happens. You get a yearly raise every year until year 13, and then it’s only flat for 3 years instead of 8. This is where the time, effort, and money you invested in years 1 through 5 really start to pay off. By year 20 you are making $20,556 more than you BA + Credential peers.
Assuming you max out your salary in year 6, over the next 15 years you will make an additional $293,348. Let’s say you spend $150 per unit to get there. You will spend about $11,250 to earn almost 300k more money. I know it’s hard. I know it’s expensive. But it’s so worth it.
Throw away all of the teaching cliches about being heroes, teaching for the love of the job, and being paid in watching your students learn. We live in a world where we need money to survive. Money isn’t everything in life, but it sure makes the basics of day-to-day living a whole lot easier. Do what you can to maximize your compensation. Your future self will thank you, especially if you save that extra income into a Roth IRA, but that’s a whole other blog post!
2) Observe as many teachers as you can.
During my credential program and student teaching I did many observation hours and learned valuable lessons about what works well in a classroom, and what does not. I had the added benefit of working as an instructional assistant in middle school and worked with six different teachers during the school day. I saw so many teaching styles from educators at different points in their careers and learned tons of classroom management strategies.
When I was hired for my first teaching job and started teaching in my own classroom, however, I rarely observed other educators, unless it was part of my induction program during my first year. The job seemed overwhelming most of the time, and I seemingly lived in my classroom cave, rarely seeing the light of day. That survival mode morphed into a practice of habit and I rarely left my room to see my colleagues in action. Looking back, I was missing out on the greatest resource available at my school: my fellow educators.
No matter where you teach I can guarantee you there are incredible people working at your school. One of my favorite things to do at my site is to use my prep period every once in a while to go observe other teachers in action. Some of them are good friends by now and they don’t mind me popping in unannounced. Other times I will ask ahead of time and set up a day that I can come observe. I don’t care what subject or grade level they teach, every time I observe someone I learn how to do something better. Most of the time I pick up a strategy on classroom management or a better way to talk with students. Other times I get a lesson idea or a better more efficient way to take attendance.
Prep periods in middle school are a precious commodity, and it is hard to use them for things other than grading or lesson planning. If you can manage to use that time every once in a while (maybe once or twice a month?) to observe and learn from others, it can benefit you in the long run.
Get out of your cave and see what the other bears are doing.
3) Grade less, interact more.
I’ve spent countless hours in my life grading things that I didn’t need to. In my early days I used to assign homework each night and collect it the next day. I would assign 3 points for each completed and corrected assignment and enter it in the gradebook for all 180 of my students. This would take 1-2 hours every day. Did anyone actually benefit from me grading it? I would argue no. Formative assessment should be meaningful, not mechanical. (Read this previous post if you want to know more about my current stance on homework).
Take a hard look at your grading practices and ask yourself “Is anyone actually getting anything positive from me grading this?”. If the answer is no or maybe, stop grading it. Not everything needs to go into the gradebook, and no, you don’t actually have to read every single thing each one of your students produces. I did at least four projects in my different math classes this past year that I didn’t grade at all (I did read them, I just didn’t grade them). None of the students cared that I didn’t grade them. They simply enjoyed doing the projects and learned some important skills along the way.
When you spend less time grading things, you open up more time for planning better lessons and interacting with your students more. In Math 8 this year I assigned a project in which they needed to decide which of three cars to purchase and justify it with research and math (here is a link to that project, if you are interested). The students had multiple days to work on it in groups, and I spent the entire time talking with students about cars, gas mileage, how car payments work, how to find electricity rates, where the best gas stations are, how sales tax works, etc. I guarantee they learned more from those 5 days working on the project than they ever would have from me grading a nightly homework assignment. Also, not one single student asked if that project would be graded or not. They just enjoyed doing the work.
Grade only what you absolutely must.
Bonus) Be kind to yourself.
As a new teacher you will mess up. You will mess up a lot. I’ve been in the game a long time and I literally screw something up every single day. The only way to survive in this job is to be kind to yourself and try to learn from your mistakes and try to do better the next day. One of the greatest things I ever learned how to do was to apologize to my students when I messed up and tell them I will try to do better next time.
What would you tell a new teacher? What did I miss? Comment below on the best advice you would give someone starting in this profession.
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