I gave a speech for a Professional Development group at the end of 2019. It’s framed as a “Letter to a First Year Teacher” (i.e. myself several years ago). I figured since we’re at the start of the year and the target audience is first year teachers, here’s a transcript & embedding of it.

Letter to a First Year Teacher

Dear Charles,

Welcome to your first-day of school as a teacher. All that training to be a teacher, all that work and all those risks and applications, just to learn how to teach the thirty-odd students about to arrive at your door.

You’re standing at the front of your classroom, a barely decorated space of desks and a basic whiteboard. The markers lay in their silver tray, bold with untested color. The bookshelf is empty for now. You and your wife spent a whole weekend setting up that room, but it still seems laughably plain.

Are you ready to be Mr. Coomber instead of just “Charles”? It’ll take some time to get used to how the name sounds, and there’s a lot of differences between the two identities that I think you’re only now starting to realize.

I still vividly remember how you feel. Scared, unprepared, excited, impatient, worried, happy, brave, smart, stupid, and completely lost, and also that you might finally be exactly where you belong. I’m only three years away from you, but I’ll admit it doesn’t ever stop being scary. It doesn’t really ever stop involving any of those emotions, but I think you’ll learn to find a balance in them over time.

You stare at the open door with dread and excitement. You wonder: Will you be able to survive this year? Will you even be able to pull this off for just a single day?  How will you change the students’ lives, or maybe it’s more like “how will you change the students lives?”…

A student enters and the rollercoaster ride begins.
–

Teaching is hard.

Every day that first year, you’ll arrive at school before everyone, before your wife wakes up, before the sun rises, before the security guard is even there to unlock the gate. Somehow you will also be the last one to leave, and you’ll find that the sun has often already set as you drive away.  Despite all the time you spend during the week, the grading, lesson planning, and all the thousand cuts of the school’s bureaucracy will still nip at your weekends until there’s little left for yourself.

And although you will work hard, it will often feel like you are laying the tracks in front of a train that is imminently speeding towards you; you will more than once be desperately lesson planning the morning of- the ten minutes before students arrive for the day. Can you improvise an hour of educating entertainment? Could you do it with 30 teenagers clawing and tearing at your attention and sanity?

There will be many bad days.

Many times that first year, you will feel like you are all alone in the battlefield in your classroom. There are so many fronts you must deal with- are your lessons differentiated? Are they effective? Are they fun? Are all of the kids engaged? Are you keeping up with the pacing guide? Are you implementing the school’s new initiative? Are you keeping data?

There’s priorities upon priorities and responsibilities upon responsibilities and you will feel like you’re drowning. You will be stressed and pushed and pulled into a hundred different directions each day. 

Classroom management is a nightmare for most new teachers, but it never quite loses its edge with you. It will so often be loud in your room. Sometimes, it will be out of control. More than once, you will have an amazing lesson plan that a more competent teacher might have changed the world with, but your students will be bored and confused and hate you for putting them through it, just because you don’t have the skill to manage them the way you ought to.

Even a couple years into your teaching career, your students will choose the name Wildcats, and the symbolism that the students identify themselves as the ‘wild class’ will break your heart. First because it means your weakness is still apparent after so many years. More though, it’s because you know that if a class believes that they are ‘the bad kids’ then they start to live up to that role even more than before. You worry that a name like that will embolden them to be even more unruly.

Other teachers will advise you to be ‘scary but not mean’. It’s a difficult line for you. Why do you have to be scary or mean? That’s not what teaching should have to be like. This difficulty will cause you suffering.

So of course, the question is:

Why do you stay in a job that can be so miserable? What keeps you here when so many of your friends quit the profession completely? How do you resolve the fact that you’ve chosen to do something that you’re failing at day after day?

—————-

It’s not the money. 

I’m sorry to say that all of those difficulties I’ve listed are true, and that there’s even more that I don’t have time to spell out. But I hope you listen when I tell you: that yes, you will struggle, you will be more present in your classroom than your own home, and you will lose out on sleep, a lot of sleep, but I promise you will survive.

And more, I think you’ll find that you like who you get to be because of it.

You see, all those minutes before and after school will not be spent like a prisoner in a cell.

Instead, you will find that you are like an artist unable to pull themselves away from their canvas. During those periods of labor, as you research and dream up new ideas and lesson plans, you will often be ‘in the zone’, in that flow-like feeling of beautiful productivity. Inside and outside of that classroom, you will sculpt yourself into the person that the kids need most. You will experiment and invent and grow, and although the growing pains will sometimes feel unbearable, the payout is well worth the cost.

Look, as a teacher, you will wear a lot of different hats. In just one day, there’s the classic subjects: you could be a scientist, a historian, and a mathematician, sure, but playing a teacher also requires the complexities of being a counselor, a parent, and a friend. During the harder times, you’ll feel like a drill sergeant, or maybe a zookeeper, but among all the different identities that you swing back and forth between each day, I think you’ll find: you really just get to be yourself. And it is your best self, in the real way that only comes from being with those you love and are loved by.

So here’s the first reason why you continue to teach: as a teacher you will draw on every aspect of yourself. Each past event, effort, and choice from your life will finally be validated. The positives will lend you strengths, and the negatives will teach you empathy. Each student is their own unique puzzle, and unlocking them requires all of the diverse parts of yourself. You’ll find that the smallest experiences and achievements from your past are all tools to be applied to this craft.

More though, you’ll never stop learning and growing as you activate all of these different sides of who you are. In just the short time that you teach your class of Wildcats, you’ll rediscover your love for soccer as you coach them in PE, finally grasp the creativity of mathematics as you work to find new ways to engage each student, and even learn ukulele side-by-side with your kids. What other job is as motivating and fertile with opportunities for self-improvement?

Every year you’ll visit blank palette of your classroom, and you will see it anew through your students’ eyes. Sometimes your room will be a research laboratory, sometimes it will be an elegant salon, and other times it will do its best imitation of a stage from Broadway.

Together, each new class will build its own little world, and there will always be new challenges, but there will also be new adventures around each corner. On your island you’ve found what Ponce de Leon failed to uncover: your own personal fountain of youth.

And true, sometimes your classroom will feel like a battlefield, but I think you’ll find it’s a worthy fight. Even your competitive side can be fed as a teacher because you have finally found a place that you can compete in, but where everyone really wins. You’ve found an arena that’s worth becoming the champion of.

–

This is your 2nd big reason to staying a teacher: you will be a champion for your students in ways that are fierce and honorable. Your Wildcats will never know the extent of the deliberate thought and effort and sacrifice that goes on behind the scenes just to add a little more magic into their lives. But they will love you for it. You’ll hear a quote in your first year as a teacher that “one of the strongest correlations of student success is how much rapport they have with their teacher” and you will live by this ideal.

You will create lesson plans that are fun for you to teach and for your students to participate in. You will plan field trips and community activities which bring both of you an incredible amount of joy. You will find opportunity after opportunity for art, and mysteries and games to infiltrate your classroom. This does help.

That said, for all the gimmicks of teaching that you invite in, most the Wildcats will be won over by the simplest, and simultaneously most difficult thing: making time to listen to them each day. You might be their only adult to authentically hear the insurmountable stresses and challenges of their lives. You’ll find that it is your commitment to using every spare moment to building these connections that will be your most powerful weapon as a teacher. You’ll make your classroom a place where everyone truly feels like they belong.

You’ll never lose your core belief that every student wants to succeed, and that they just need the right tools to get there. A key moment for you during the next few years will be when you cultivate the questions: “What’s wrong?” and “Are you okay?” into becoming your quiet mantra when a student is messing up. This will open whole new doors that might have been otherwise shut if you had snapped at the student instead. These responsive classroom techniques do not come easily, but pay magnificent dividends for you as the years go by.

Through your efforts, your students will learn to express themselves, and you will teach them how to begin to manage the torrent of emotions that some of them bear each day. Your proudest accomplishment in teaching is that the students that you most frequently discipline still tell you that you’re the best teacher they’ve ever had. You’ve found a way to be warm and demanding, a way to be a teacher, but still be authentic to yourself. You will often see yourself as a river, smoothing down the sharp edges of 30 stones that have just been tossed into you.

So, I’m so happy to tell you that despite your fears, your Wildcats will learn and they will learn well. They will score highly on tests, but also visibly transform into kinder, critically thinking, empathetic human beings. So really, you’ll be victorious in the most important sense: your students will succeed.

And doesn’t a river change a little each time it meets another stone? This brings us to the third and final reason that you’ll burn bright, but never out under the crazy strain of being a new teacher. It has to do with those 30 kids that you’re looking at right now.

As a teacher, you will find a community.

You’ve chosen to share your most precious of resources, time, a hundred thousand moments with those 30 kids. You will witness them in the way that all humans need to be witnessed. They want to be understood, and heard, and you get to be there for them.  Conversely, they will share their moments with you. They will witness you.

—-

Consider one last time, your Wildcats. Throughout your year with them, you will learn their dreams, and fears, weaknesses and strengths, and you will change the trajectories of each of their lives. You will weave them together, and pretend to be great for them, and through one-step-at-a-time help them find a little bit of greatness themselves.Those 30 students will steal your heart, and yes, sometimes it will be difficult, but when you’re with them, you’ll feel more at home than ever before. For one golden year, you can make sure they get all of the understanding, expectations, and support that they deserve. 

Charles, your class will always be loud. But that loudness will be discussion and laughter and joy. Every morning, your classroom will be filled with music, and your students will come in, and you will greet them and they will smile and truly be happy to come to school. 

In these moments of tranquility, you will finally feel the rarest of emotions of life: you will feel content. 

How will you change the students’ lives? In the very same way that they change yours. You will help each other grow, make each other smile, and achieve more than either of you had dared to hope.

You will be a Teacher. A Guru. And a Wildcat.

There’s a lot of power in those names, Charles. 

Sincerely,

Mr. Coomber

P.S. More than just learning ukulele with your students, you’ll be inspired by them to write a song. I’d like to share it with you.

*plays song*