First Year Teacher needing prayers

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brockmac

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I am a first year teacher. I am having a terrible time with classroom discipline. I am teaching in an urban public school so I cannot infuse religion into the curriculum. I do not know what to do to reach my students.

I need God’s help and your prayers.

Please pray for me.

Thank you.
 
:signofcross:

My wife just got her certification for teaching in our state and is now looking for her first job. Teaching is not easy. I don’t know this through experience but I know it from what I put teachers through when I was in school.

You will be in our prayers.

God bless
 
I taught for one year in a catholic jr. high.

Religion does not make discipline easier. It is also not your job to “reach your students” with religion (if that is what you are trying to do).

“Reaching your students” with the core curriculum is a different matter - that I can’t help you with. I hated teaching and left as soon as I could.
 
Brockmac, I wonder what age you are teaching, what subjects and how many students are in your class?

A couple of suggestions regrdless of age, etc.: Sprinkle Holy Water liberally, in particular around the door frame and pray in the classroom for guidance, strength and peace.

Teaching is a most wonderful, rewarding, challenging, frustrating, heartbreaking vocation.

Your first year is especially challenging because you don’t yet have a store of tricks up your sleeve to help with discipline.

I have taught in Christian, secular and now a Muslim school; the discipline techniques you use are the same (the words you use are different).

May you find a way to relate to your students.
 
brockmac said:
I am a first year teacher. I am having a terrible time with classroom discipline. I am teaching in an urban public school so I cannot infuse religion into the curriculum. I do not know what to do to reach my students.

I need God’s help and your prayers.

Please pray for me.

Thank you.
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Ask your principal to sit in on your classroom and observe your methods. S/he may then be able to offer some good ideas.

Infusing religion generally has little to no effect on discipline, FWIW.
How old are the kids?
 
brockmac said:
I am a first year teacher. I am having a terrible time with classroom discipline. I am teaching in an urban public school so I cannot infuse religion into the curriculum. I do not know what to do to reach my students.

I need God’s help and your prayers.

Please pray for me.

Thank you.
Click to expand...
Hello Brockmac,

My first experience with teaching was in college as a grad teaching assistant. That was easy. Then I accepted a position at a Catholic High School. That was hard. Several times during the first year I was ready to quit because of discipline problems. At the end of the year, I decided to try one more year and everything was different. The kids that had given me the most trouble now actually liked me and they were the ones who hung out the windows of their cars after they graduated because they were so very pleased to see me. There are so many tricks to teaching that I don’t know where to begin so let me dive in: Know your subject. Love your subject! Be excited! Be well prepared. Fill the entire class period with meaningful activity. Be flexible. Admit when you are wrong. Never (knowingly) lie. Love your students! The kids that cause trouble need attention. Find ways to give them good attention. Don’t be their buddy. Love them as their teacher, mentor, advocate. Don’t hold grudges, ever. Don’t gossip. Get involved with the school outside of class (and get involved with your community) so that the students can see you in a different light. Don’t neglect your prayer life. (Yes, I sprinkle holy water.) This is my 25th year of teaching in the same high school and there are no discipline problems in my classroom. Teaching is an art. It takes time. God bless.
 
I don’t have a lot of teaching experience but the one time I was student teaching. I found that even very disruptive kids get excited when you try something new and interesting.

For my student teaching assignment. I was supposed to teach conversion of fractions to decimal. But instead of just jumping into the mechanics of the math, I first conducted a poll of the kids favorite TV shows.

This was a junior HS class so they can be holy terrors if you let them get out of hand. The classs was so excited about letting other folks know what their favorite shows were that the math class went very well. I followed the tv survey with computing batting averages.

Getting the math into real world applications was also a great help to calm folks down. IF you can catch the kids attention, you can do wonders. Sometimes I regret having chosen a different route from teaching.
 
If I may, discipline is one of the hardest things to learn to implement. Ask your Principal or HR person if you can have a mentor. My daughter is only in her third year teaching and finally has a mentor. Her first two years were teaching first grade in a small Catholic school - she had no mentor which would have been very helpful for her. She is currently teaching in a special ed. high school setting but due to the number of students and needs she will be transferring to a Grade school teaching special ed.

I again suggest you ask for help, don’t think you are a failure because of this, disciplining a class full of children (no matter what age) is a learned thing and it is best learned by seeing others do it or having them give you suggestions for it.

Brenda V.
 
PLEASE PM ME. I taught in Chicago public schools before my kiddo arrived, and I would be happy to pass on any information, advice, materials, etc. Actually I will just PM you right now.
 
1.) You are going to have to get control as soon as you get back from “Winter” break.
2.) What Brenda said- GET A MENTOR!
3.) Does your district use something on the equivalent of Character Counts" and the like? Implement it.
4.) Don’t sluff off. Be consistent. Call a student on his or her behavior the first time he or she does it, and follow through. You are not doing them any favors when you let them continue to push you around- and they will push you around…

Other than that, if you need more information, you are going to have grade level and/ or courses.
 
Well you are in Texas, one of the few states that still allows corporal punishment in public schools:blackeye: . Here in my state we can get in trouble for looking at a kid cross eyed it seems like.:eek:

In all seriousness. Discipline is difficult, especially for beginning teachers. As a shop teacher, I not only have to worry about discipline from the standpoint of being productive and so forth, but most importantly, I need to worry about safety. I really need to have control of my classes to avoid accidents. Being in the shop however, I have a lot of opportunity for special cleaning detail and other extra chores that I can use for discipline. I know that I tend to take a behavioralist approach (using positive and negative reinforcement as a means of extrinsic motivation) which is discouraged in today’s credentialing programs, but it works for me. I am taking a year off from being full time to work on a masters right now and the professors are constantly telling me that my methods are wrong. Who knows, maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle.
 
Google “Jim Fay love and logic”

I attended a Love and Logic workshop 2 years ago. During those 5 days, I spoke to people from 40 states including Alaska. Those people came to Wichita because Jim Fay is an expert on dealing with students and one’s own children. In all my years in education, this workshop was one of the most meaningful and helpful experiences.

You can order videos, audio cassettes, etc. from Love and Logic headquarters and if you call, you will always have a person answering the phone, never a recording or a service.

I have a great niece teaching in a very large school district in Texas, and they provided Love and Logic materials to all their beginning teachers.

I just retired in May form 50 years of teaching. My first year was hard, but it got better and then became wonderful. All the years were in elementary schools (4 of them) and most years were spent with middle school kids. I decided to retire while I still loved it and still could laugh. I’m keeping in touch by continuing to coach the scholars bowl teams at my last school.

So hang in there. Pray to the kids guardian angels - even if you are in a public school. Those kids have guardian angels too!
 
homepage.mac.com/chrisbiffle/Menu38.html

homepage.mac.com/chrisbiffle/.Public/Teaching%20Teenagers.pdf

I was recently introduced to the above site. I think it’s pretty good stuff.

My dad, a retired teacher and coach, always said that every teacher needs to give it two years because the first year is so hard. I remember nodding enthusiastically, but I was completely unprepared for how hard that first year would be.

I, myself, retired to be a SAHM after my first year of teaching. I had a pretty easy school, but I actually took over the class after the original teacher left at the first nine weeks because the kids were walking all over her. Not a pretty situation for a first year teacher.

I do think you should talk to your department head or dean of students. They are well aware of the difficulties of teaching in an urban school as well as being inexperienced. They will be able to back you up.

Hopefully, the new semester will be a good time to make changes. God bless, I’m leaving for Mass in a few minutes, and I will remember you at the Consecration…

One last thought, even though you can’t bring God to your students, you can bring your students to God–in prayer. You can fast for them, too. 🙂
 
brockmac said:
I am a first year teacher. I am having a terrible time with classroom discipline. I am teaching in an urban public school so I cannot infuse religion into the curriculum. I do not know what to do to reach my students.

I need God’s help and your prayers.

Please pray for me.

Thank you.
Click to expand...
Hi Brockmac. I work in a public middle school (not as a teacher, though), and one thing I know is indispensible for our 1st year (and 2nd and 3rd year) teachers is the New Educators Support System. All new teachers are paired up with a veteran teacher in the same school in order to get advice, encouragement and practical strategies for classroom management and curriculum. In addition to one on one mentoring, there are also regular support group meetings, so the new teachers come into the system with a built in network of support.
Please check with your administrator or personnel department to see if your school district has something similar. I’ve been in my school for 6 years now, and we have only lost 1 teacher in that time (we usually get 2-3 brand new teachers a year).
 
kujayhawk said:
Google “Jim Fay love and logic”

I attended a Love and Logic workshop 2 years ago. During those 5 days, I spoke to people from 40 states including Alaska. Those people came to Wichita because Jim Fay is an expert on dealing with students and one’s own children. In all my years in education, this workshop was one of the most meaningful and helpful experiences.

quote]

I second the Love and Logic. My district has started implementing it in a few schools. We have seen a positive change! I’m looking forward to being trained so I can implement it in my classroom.

The other advice I have (coming from a teacher of emotionally disturbed/mentally ill/behavior disorder students who look for any loop hole) is to have firm, clear and consistent expectations. If students know what to expect it makes life a lot easier for them (and for us!). A good book to read is “The Essential 55.” I don’t agree with everything but the teacher (Ron Clark) took a classroom that was in total chaos (behavior problems, very low test scores etc.) and taught them what he thought were the 55 rules that everyone needs to know. He was very firm, clear and consistent with his expectations. His students turned around AND all were able to pass the state assessment.
Click to expand...
 
brockmac said:
I am a first year teacher. I am having a terrible time with classroom discipline. I am teaching in an urban public school so I cannot infuse religion into the curriculum. I do not know what to do to reach my students.

I need God’s help and your prayers.

Please pray for me.

Thank you.
Click to expand...
Praying for you. Take it from a current teacher, the first year is the hardest. Have you taken APL training yet? That might help with the discipline issues. Also, do you have someone mentoring you? Ask them for advice if you need it.
 
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