Helpful Bits of Advice from Veteran Teachers

• Teach your students as you would wish your children to be taught.
• Have one premise for your classroom rules – mutual respect.
• Have no more than three rules – mine are: think, be polite, do your work.
• Live and love your subject(s).
• Select the simplest way at all times and focus on rapport and calm discipline before trying to teach content.
• Rely on all the mistakes you make.
• Never fight a battle you can't win, and never ask a question you don't know the answer to.
• Program some fun into every lesson and the rest will follow.

• Realize that you will make mistakes, because becoming a teacher did not make you perfect.
• Don't be afraid to apologize to your students when you have made a mistake.
• Realize that the lesson plan is just that – a plan. Remember, we make plans every day of our life but rarely do we carry them out 100% of the time.
• Get a good night sleep every night.
• Read, read, read as much about the teaching profession as you can.
• Join a professional organization.
• Write your name in permanent ink on the front of everything you own in your classroom. Teachers are notorious for borrowing something of interest and then forgetting where they got it from.
• Don't let your teaching job become your life! Of all the professions in the world, teachers could easily work themselves to death because so much in this world can be used to teach our students.

Great teachers have little external history to record.
Their lives go over into other lives.
These men are pillars in the intimate structure of our schools.
They are more essential than its stones or beams.
They will continue to be a kindling force and a revealing power;
part of the necessary fabric men breathe.

1. Where the bathrooms were all located.

2. Never tell the kids how old you are.

3. Never, EVER, be SUPER NICE when disciplining a kid.

Anonymous