Reflections on Being a First Year Teacher and Growing from Assignment Failure

 Reflections on Being a First Year Teacher

    Being a first year teacher is one of the hardest jobs on the planet. Nothing can prepare you for what you'll experience, nothing. Despite being one of the most difficult things one could do in life, there are many rewards for being a first year teacher. The impact you have on children, the thrill of creating your own lessons, the wonderful experience of seeing the growth in children and yourself. Coming in halfway through a school year and without any formal student teaching experience, being a first year teacher was something felt extra challenging for me, but ultimately confirmed that this was a profession worthy of my passion.

    First year teaching is not easy. The typical first year teacher walks in with a week of inservice to catch up and that's it. Brand new school, brand new co workers. A monumental challenge to say the least. Some teachers may have the advantage of having other teachers working with the same prep, some will not. Often, first year teachers will be making all of their assignments from scratch. A challenging, yet rewarding way of work. When something works, you feel amazing. When something doesn't, you feel like your in the wrong profession. This is part of the process of being new at anything.

    Over the course of my time, I had material that worked and material that didn't. While most things worked, I still remember my "Korea movie trailer project" during my Korea unit that didn't quite land with... anyone so to speak. A simple 5 slide powerpoint with visuals to indicate how you'd advertise a movie trailer seemed simple enough, right? Wrong. This was the assignment that flopped for me and had many students confused. See, my original idea involved *actually* filming a movie trailer individually or in a small group, but I became concerned that was too HW heavy and with class sizes too big, would be a bit of disaster to do in class. So, I decided to rebrand it to "come up with a title slide, three scene slides, and a why did you choose these scenes" which seemed simple enough. Turns out "scenes" were highly confusing for students! In the end, I pivoted that scenes to be like a 3 point thesis statements (what are the most important parts of the topic your doing!) and that worked better. The downside, I felt totally stupid and incompetent at my job! The direction sheet was updated *multiple* times over the course of the assignment.

    See, something they don't mention when you are  a first year teacher is that you won't have any student examples. That's natural of course, but I *really* could've used a student example for that assignment. In the end, I ended up editing completed "scenes" to the direction sheet as examples. Totally messy, but helped student clarification and guided them to the end result. In the end, the final instructions looked like this, hyperlinks and all providing examples

Direction sheet after multiple iterations

                        

"Why did I choose these scenes" student example

    In the end, students completed the assignment and it worked! Definitely not my finest hour but it brings me to my next point. Handling disruptions is part of being a first year teacher. Not everything is going to be ironed out, and that's ok! It's how you adapt to changes that makes a first year teacher stand out. In this case, instead of just giving up I had to adapt and make changes while we did the assignment. This lead to a better result for students, but also for me. Would I assign this assignment again? Probably not! But that's part of the growth experience that goes along with being a first year teacher. Ultimately, if you can remain composed and adaptable, the students won't even notice. Thankfully, almost every other assignment went well, which validated a lot of my creative thinking. But there will always be assignments that just don't land, and that's part of the risk taking process of being a teacher. I'm happy to have learned everything that I did and it's made a better and stronger teacher.