Since you have mastered classroom management, how about videos of some of your typical class periods?

As a potential new teacher, I am eager to see how you do classroom management, from beginning to end of class.

If student privacy is an issue, how about video shot from back of classroom, and fuzzy-up any student faces?

I think your next calling is to teach the teachers!

Jenny has been around this blog since, like, day one; Jenn and I learned how to teach in the same UCD cohort; And I subscribe to Jen’s blog though I can’t remember why and I can’t bring myself to unsubscribe ’cause, yeah, the writing’s good but she also curses like a longshoreman and I dig that.

@Robert, along those lines, I try not to assume that what motivates me to teach, motivates other people to teach.

I get the feeling of not being challenged and looking for that next mountain to climb. Luckily, at the elementary level I’ve been able to change my role in my school to keep that energy. I’ve taught fourth and fifth and looped with my students and now I’m teaching first. It’s kept me on my toes and that’s been important to me. I felt like I was in a rut. You have to find what works for you.

I stayed in the classroom for nine years. Like you, Dan, the “mechanics” of the job were mostly under control somewhere around year four. I did new challenges to keep me through the second half of the decade, though.

About the time that I was feeling comfortable with the basics of what I was doing (but long before I felt fully competent … a day which never arrived completely, btw), I found two new challenges.

The first was the National Writing Project: an association of teachers that challenged me to see myself as a professional within a larger group of professionals who were quite capable, thank you very much, of teaching each other how to become better at the job: specifically, better teachers of writing. I would guess that your blogging experiences, at least in part, served a similar function.

The second was that my school became a “magnet” school (sorta) for the fine arts. I was part of the team that worked on that transition and helped to design the humanities and creative writing programs. That took me from knowing how to manage and teach a mostly-successful English class to thinking about how to manage and teach two four-year programs (humanities and creative writing). That challenge kept me around for another five years.

When it became clear that the county wouldn’t actually be supporting that initiative (even though the county created it), and that all our work and success with students would remain unfunded, under-supported, and eventually die, I decided not to die with it and left the classroom.

Not sure if there’s anything to learn from all that or not. I’ll leave it to the wiser and/or more experienced to discern.

Year 1: Classroom Management / Meaningful Assessment / Engaging Curriculum
Year 2: Classroom Management / Meaningful Assessment / Engaging Curriculum
Year 3: Classroom Management / Visual Instruction / Engaging Curriculum
Year 4: Visual Instruction
Year 5: Um.

Again, not to say I hit those marks every single day, just that, intellectually, especially, those challenges no longer motivate me.

Kilian, I don’t buy a) that ed schools (or at least not the ed schools in my locus of experience) overemphasize classroom management (I’m struggling to recall any emphasis at all), or b) that it’s possible to underestimate the challenge of classroom management.

There is much, much higher fruit, yes, but no way a 23-yo urban educator will reach any of it if her kids are hacking away at the ladder beneath her.

And sucks about the degree to which you’re experiencing buyer’s remorse (whatever degree that is). I’m sure you anticipated it.

And, for whatever it’s worth, while several people have pointed out the joys of a job that lets you make solid, incremental, yearly progress (cf. Jeri) while maintaining a home life (cf. Nancy) and summers off (cf. my old colleague at Asilomar), no one has offered me a compelling challenge for the second half of the first decade teaching. I can think of several in education, though outside the classroom, but none come to mind in my current setup.