LAUGH
Whether you have been teaching for three decades or three weeks, you are a rock star educator all the same. However, experienced teachers and new teachers have a lot of differences. Your first year of teaching is full of wanting to do everything perfectly, while teachers who have been in the game for years have learned certain tricks that make it look like they have it all figured out. Here are ten ways new and experienced teachers are like two different species.
1. Classroom Management
New teachers
Possess a whole arsenal of Teacher Pay Teacher attention getters printed on brightly colored cardstock, laminated, and hole-punched on a ring. When the class gets out of control, they frantically flip through, hoping that maybe, “Hocus Pocus, everybody focus” will work better than “Yakety Yak, don’t talk back.”
Experienced teachers
Do not prescribe to the cute attention grabber movement because their death glare has been working since 2007. They are frequently called down to an unruly lunchroom because their mere presence causes students to stop acting a fool immediately. Newbies, lunch workers, and the office staff stand agape, wondering how any single human can make a room full of 100 students behave with a simple look.
2. Lesson Planning
New teachers
Dedicate every waking hour to lesson planning in their Erin Condren planner because when you are a new teacher, lesson planning is life and the planner is just plain fun to write in. Every planning session at school is studiously used to the fullest potential with standards-based, backward planning informed by student assessments.
Experienced teachers
Lesson plan on the couch with a glass of wine and Mrs. Maisel because let’s be real… grade-level meetings are for swapping recipes and complaining about the latest busy work they won’t be doing. They know their lessons are standards-based and are informed by their students’ assessments because they know the standards and curriculum by heart, word-for-word.
3. Distance Teaching
New teachers
Create a full-on replica of a wall in their classroom, complete with cute motivational art, pom-poms for flair, and a magnetic whiteboard to teach on.
Experienced teachers
Refuse to take on the expense or effort of building a makeshift classroom in their home. Students get a view of their dusty china cabinet or the winter coats in their closet. They do their best to be peppy and fun as they present Google Slides, but this is not their jam.
4. Staff Meetings
New teachers
Show up to the meeting with a personalized hybrid notebook-clipboard and matching Flair pens to write down every single word the principal utters using an elaborate color-coding system. They sit up, alert, and ready to absorb ALL THE THINGS.
Experienced teachers
Show up to the meeting empty-handed. If it’s necessary to write something down, they grab an Expo marker out of their pocket and write it down on a greasy donut napkin. They’ve somehow mastered the inexplicable art of sleeping with their eyes open with a facial expression that screams: “this could have been an email.”
5. Buying Classroom Supplies and Décor
New teachers
Buy out the entire Target Dollar Spot and school supply aisles on their way to Lakeshore, IKEA, and HomeGoods, where they drop more than their school loan on brightly-colored bins and a gorgeous white desk (because the brown, 70s-era school ones are “ew”). Let’s not forget the geometric print rugs that will be covered with Expo marker “oops,” not even a month into the school year.
Experienced teachers
Buy a brand-new pack of the name-brand Sharpies. That’s it. That’s all they buy for the new school year because they won’t buy school supplies that students eat. Their “minimalist” classroom “theme” they created 15 years ago will just have to cut it.
6. Open House and Parent-Teacher Conferences
New teachers
Spend hours after contract time the week leading up to open house making a Meet the Teacher newsletter, themed signs and posters. During conferences, they give out goodie bags for the students, complete with take-home math manipulatives.
Experienced teachers
Don’t realize it is now a “thing” to create your own theme or buy one from Teachers Pay Teachers for the open house. They clearly don’t have time for this so they just put up the same old PowerPoint with talking points they have used for a decade. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
7. Professional Development
New teachers
Genuinely want to soak in all the learning. They arrive at the PD with their personalized teacher bag, their Hydro Flask adorned with cute teacher stickers, and a fantastic attitude that makes the veteran teachers feel a little guilty about their “meh” attitude, for just a few seconds.
Experienced teachers
Could teach the entire PD. So instead of listening, they unabashedly get out their laptop and lesson plan or catch up on grading. The principal doesn’t say a thing because they’re secretly scared of some of the veteran teachers.
8. Taking Grading Home For the Weekend
New teachers
Have a peppy teacher bag with a motivational saying in a Beckham font, bursting at the seams with at least a month’s worth of work they genuinely think they will get done after Sunday Funday brunch.
Experienced teachers
Walk out of school on a Friday with their lunch bag, a swagger, and a smile because they left behind everything- the work, the stress, the expectations, everything. Bye, Felicia! They realized long ago that there are simply not enough hours in a day and their plates are piled too high to get it all done.
9. Bladder Control
New teachers
Have actual nightmares about the principal walking in when they urgently need to run to the bathroom. .
Experienced teachers
Not only do they have bladders made of actual steel after over a decade of holding it for hours every day, but they’ve also figured out the optimum times to hightail it to the bathroom that is magically never occupied. It’s like a science, and veterans have it down.
10. Contract Hours
New teachers
Basically, live at school. The idea of “contract hours” is laughable when you watch the sunrise and sunset from your classroom windows. When they are at home, they have stacks of grading and a to-do pile as big as the unfolded clean laundry thrown on their bed. They won’t see four o’clock from anywhere but their classroom for a good, long while.
Experienced teachers
Abide by contract hours because they have their lesson planning, grading, and prep memorized. They refuse to spend any valuable time on lesson plans that admin won’t even read, so they send a picture of the chicken scratch on their lunch-stained desk calendar and call it a day. They make sure not to give out assignments that take too much time to grade. This ain’t their first rodeo, as can be told by their gray hairs, eyebrow wrinkles, and bold take-no-BS-attitude.
No matter if you get up in the morning with precisely 15 minutes to get to school or you’re in your classroom before the sun rises, you are appreciated. Now more than ever, we need to stick together, but we also need to laugh and appreciate all the different ways teaching kids can be done effectively. Despite where we are on our teaching journey, we all scream obscenities in our heads at least once a day (sometimes out loud). And that is a fact.
