Any positives to having a teacher fresh out of school?
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Anonymous
| Due to retirements and relocations, our children's elementary school hired several new teachers this year. A couple of them are experienced, but others are recent graduates. We won't find out teacher assignments until later this week, but I am of course borrowing trouble and worrying that one or both of our kids will get a brand new teacher. Does anyone have a good experience having a complete newbie as a teacher? Teachers, were you completely clueless your first year? |
Anonymous
| your first year you make a lot of mistakes, but you also work so hard and a good new teacher will be invested, fresh, curious, creative, and energetic. |
Anonymous
| I don't understand this hatred of first year teachers. The three best teachers I ever had were all first year (one in ES and two in middle school). They had the most energy and enthusiasm and I found that some teachers I had who had been there for 20 seemed burnt out and jaded. Even in the eyes of an 8 year old. |
Anonymous
OP here. I would not use the word hatred for my feelings. It is more like trepidation. A brand new person is likely to make more mistakes than an experienced one, and I worry those mistakes will be made on our children. The whole point of my post is to find out the positives in the situation. I am glad to hear you had three good experiences. |
Anonymous
Sorry I shouldn't have used the word hatred. I was thinking of all of the threads about this recently. I understand your trepidation but I think that teachers of any experience make mistakes, just different ones. |
Anonymous
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As a former high school teacher, I can tell you that my first year teaching was the year I put the most energy and hours into the classes I taught. Yes, some of my lessons didn't go as well as I had hoped, but I spent a LOT of time preparing for them, more than I had since. I was much more creative, took more risks with trying to make things interesting, etc.
Yes, first year teachers are inexperienced but they are fresh and new in the profession and are more likely to try new things than seasoned teachers. Also, since they are fresh out of school, they will be most knowledgeable in current research and philosophies in teaching and education. |
Anonymous
| My child had brand new teachers for three different grades in elementary school! Those teachers may not have had as much experience as the other teachers, but those were great years. The first-year teachers really seemed to get to know the needs of the individual students (rather than relying on past experience). And at our school, at least, first-year teachers had a lot of institutional support. In our case, I didn't see any "mistakes" that would affect the kids in negative ways. |
Anonymous
It's your job as the parent to bring up any concerns you may have with the teacher. DD had a new teacher last year and DD wasn't keeping up with her work. She was the most advanced in her class and to her it was just busy work and she didn't want to do it. DD was still getting A's on all the work she was doing and the teacher knew she could do the work and didn't grade the work she didn't do. I told the teacher to give my child zeros because that's what she had earned. She needed to have consequences to her actions. DD's third quarter grades weren't great, she had a C and some B's and her progress report for the fourth quarter was even worse. DD worked really hard and finished off the second grade with one B, one Above Grade Level and the rest were A's. I don't think DD would have worked so hard if I hadn't told her teacher to give her the grades she earned. All three of us learned from the situation. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
I always wonder why "former" teachers respond. Obviously, it didn't work out for you. why? |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
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Positives:
Not jaded Clueless to the school politics Not counting the days to retirement May be more familiar with current academic approaches (depends on major / program they graduated from) Many have high energy - spend a lot of time lesson planning However .... they may be putting in the time to lesson plans b/c they are not fluent with the curiculium steep learning curve to the nuances of systems of the school - time reporting, report cards, others learning classroom mgmt / parent mgmt If you are comparing a future top teacher to a teacher who has checked out - sure the new one is a better place to be If you are comparing a future top teacher to a current top teacher - current is where I would want my child |
Anonymous
Both of our children (two grades apart) had brand new teachers for kindergarten; the older of the two also had a brand new teacher for 5th grade. The newbies were enthusiastic, joyful, and seemed to love their jobs -- and, in turn, our kids loved their newbies and being a part of their "first" class. As a parent, I've found that newbies tend to be more accessible/open than has been the case with some (but nowhere close to half) of the experienced/veteran teachers I've encountered (i.e., they're more likely to have a BTDT-attitude when it comes to a particular student/concern). Also, at our elementary, it seems that newbies are spared from having to deal with/manage the more disruptive/challenging students who are instead assigned to experienced teachers. For our family, "having a complete newbie as a teacher" has been "a good experience" 100% of the time versus about 75% of the time with non-newbie. So for us, whether the experience has been "good" or "bad" didn't have anything to do with how many years, if any, the person had been teaching but what that person brought to the classroom each day. In fact, the only difference I have ever noticed between a newbie and a vet/experienced teacher is that the newbies tend to have less "stuff" up on their classroom walls and tend to have less cluttered desks (I guess because they haven't yet accumulated the coffee mugs, apple motif ornaments/paperweights, and other stuff/junk parents -- including me -- bestow on teachers as holiday/teacher appreciation/end-of-year gifts). |
Anonymous
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OP, I definitely still had a lot to learn my first year of teaching, but that was the year I gave my all to the kids and really loved them. I still remember them fondly.
As the years pass, the kids start to blur together, but there's something so special about your first real class! |
Anonymous
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b/c the subject line itself is loaded
your words: ". . .but I am of course borrowing trouble and worrying that one or both of our kids will get a brand new teacher . . ." way to set the tone! any POSITIVES? wth? Already you're leading into a discussion that has most thinking that it's the rare first year teacher who has anything good to offer. Again, we don't question those in other professions, do we??? Why did you even ask this? You can't micromanage your child's life. So if your daughter or son has a new teacher, just let it go. Why did you feel the need to post this? What can you possibly gain from "insight" on this thread? Will you go in and offer to "help" in an effort to improve the teacher's performance? b/c everyone's an expert in education Let the teacher teach and allow your child space to grow w/o hovering! so many controlling parents on this board - I only hope that most posters are in the minority b/c if you represent the majority, education is going to hell in a handbasket.
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