This year I have started my 6^thyear as a teacher in a brand-new school. As it is now November, we are almost half way through the 2^ndquarter and I finally feel like I am getting the hang of a new system, new students, and new culture. This school is much bigger than the last school I taught at, and I have many other teachers to collaborate with and learn from. At my last school I was only biology, earth science, and anatomy teacher, but now I am working with several other teachers that teach the same class that I do. This has been wonderful experience for me as I am learning to grow in my teaching pedagogy and adapt to a new way of doing things. Many of the science teachers in my department worked as biochemists, physical therapists, and environmental engineers before becoming teachers and I am so blessed to work with people with so much expertise in what they teach.

This has led my think a lot about who I am as a teacher. You see, the last couple of months have led me to compare myself with my new coworkers. Sometimes I feel so inadequate as a teacher. I never wanted to be anything but a teacher and I got my teaching license right out of college and started teaching at 23. I do not have my master’s degree yet and I have never worked in a science field. I feel like I don’t have the wealth of knowledge that my fellow teachers do and I have often worried about looking like I don’t know what I’m doing. I fear that I will mess up, that my students won’t learn what they are supposed to, and I doubt that I am a good enough teacher. I’ve tried to abandon certain lessons and ways I teach and tried to adopt what other teachers do.

At the same time, I sometimes find myself pushing back at certain lessons and content covered by my fellow teachers. I may not have experience working in the science field, but I have 5 years of teaching experience and I feel like I have learned a lot about how to structure clear and engaging lessons that students both enjoy and learn from. Sometimes I don’t want to adapt to what my new coworkers do and I want to teach like I always have.

However, I don’t think either of these attitudes is helpful. Neither doubting myself as a teacher nor being prideful in my teaching and resistant to change is going to make me a better a teacher and help my students. Lately I’ve been trying to do two things:

• Be humble and learn
• Stick to my teaching gut

I think there needs to be a measure of both humility and confidence in teaching.  I don’t know everything and there are many areas where I can grow as a teacher, but I do have lots of teaching experience and what works for one teacher may not work for me. It is ok to stick to my own teaching gut and say no to doing things that don’t work for the way I teach. Last month I tried a new way of teaching the structure of muscles in the way that my co-teacher did that just did not work for me or my students. They got very confused and I had to go back and reteach. However, I really like the format of lab reports other teachers in my department use and I’m using them every unit. There can be balance between learning new ways of teaching and sticking with what will work for you.

All-in-all I’m very thankful for my new school, my new students, my new co-workers, an opportunity to stretch and grow, and an opportunity learn more about myself as a teacher. As the year continues, I hope to continue to remind myself to stay humble and to stick to my gut. How about you? Have you had experience with this? How do you keep yourself both grounded and confident in your teaching when you doubt and compare yourself to others?

Do you struggle with the organization of paper work in your classroom? Does your desk have multiple stacks of student work, late work, absent work, evaluations, advisory activities, permission slips, budget requests, receipts, etc all over it at the end of the day? Even as an organized person, I have struggled with both keeping track of paper work. The first few years of teaching were the worst. In my first year, I just didn’t know what to expect and wasn’t prepared to have to keep track of so many physical papers, and then as the years continued and I more classes were added to my teaching load, the problem just got worse. I now teach in a school that is 1:1 with laptops and I have fewer classes to teach so the paper work is much less, but I still find that I have many papers to keep track of. Additionally, I do not have my own classroom and I move from room to room with a cart and the chance of losing and misplacing papers is huge! That being said, I’ve tried to come up with a system that gives all paperwork its own place to reduce clutter and keep my life organized.

The organization of paperwork many seem like an insignificant thing to some, but I think that it is an extremely important part of my classroom procedures. When I am the throws of a busy day, having all my papers organized in the proper places takes some of the mental work out of finding what I need for the day. Personally, I also find that a clean and organized desk takes some of the mentally clutter and stress away during a hard teaching day.

First, I keep this black paper holder/drawer on my desk. This is where Iput papers that need to be dealt with today. If I need to grade or organize something that day or first thing the next morning, it goes there. When I had my own classroom, this is where I put all my papers. Anything I collected from students or was given to me by another teacher or when students needed to turn something in while I was busy doing something
else, it went there. Then at the end of the day, I would go through and organize papers into the places they needed to go.

From the black paper holder, papers can go in a number of places. If the papers are homework, quizzes, or something else I collected form the whole class I need to grade, I put them in this expanding file folder that I can easily take home if I need to.

If the paper is late or absent work from a student, I put in a separate folder for late and absent work. I also keep all the hard copy keys and my paper grade book here.

If the papers are something I need to take home, I put them in the front pocket my teaching binder which is basically my plan book. If the papers are other things like advisory activities or permission slips, I keep those in separate folders that I keep on or in my desk.

I also keep another set of paper holders on my desk. On the top file I will put any hard copies of papers I need to copy for class later. On the second file, I put work that is already graded and needs to be handed back to students. (As you can see, I did a lot of graded on this day!) On the third, I put any papers I need to recycle. (I don’t have a recycling bin in my office and need to take recyclables to the classroom across the hallway) The fourth file is empty right now. And the 5^thI use to put any hard copies of things I want to file into binders.

To return work to students using hanging files in a milk crate. Each student has their own file and they are organized alphabetically by last name. However, I now teach semester classes and I will gain and lose many different students when the first semester ends, so I may go to a number system instead of using last names. I like this system for graded work, because I can just take this crate out and students can get their graded work while I do something else like take attendance or set up a lab or help another student.

Next, I keep hanging files in my desk to store copies of things I will use in my class later in the week. For example, I give my students a short quiz every Friday, so if I’m planning ahead and make copies of the quiz on Wednesday, I put those copies in the hanging file for Friday so they are out of the way and not just sitting in a pile on my desk. When I had my own classroom, I kept files in an upright file holders like the one pictured on the right. I had one file holder for each day of the week and each class had a file in each holder. I would keep my copies for the week there and then I could just pull out the files in the morning and I had all my copies for my classes organized in a place where I could easily grab them.

As I said before, I travel from classroom to classroom with a cart this year so I use this fold holder on my chart to keep papers organized. The front file is where I put copies of papers to give to students and then the files behind are for each section of that class. So on Fridays I will take quizzes out of the first file and then when I collect them for my period A class, they will go in the A file to be taken back to my office for grading.

As teachers, we make so many little decision during the day that when combined can become exhausting. Don’t let finding and keeping track of paper work take up any more mental space in your busy teacher brain! This is how I combat mental and paper clutter, but you can come up with a system that works for you that gives every paper it’s proper place.

Happy October everyone! I hope your school is off to a great start! I don’t know about you, but it feels like September has just flown by! I’ve been so busy adjusting to a new school and getting to know my new students that I feel like I’ve barely had time to catch my breath!

For this blog post, I wanted to compile a very short list of blogs for teachers that I have repeatedly gone back to over the years for ideas, resources, or encouragement. My first year of teaching I did not really have a mentor that I felt like I could bounce ideas off of and I felt a little isolated as I tried to keep my head above the water of first-year-teaching. I went to the Internet for a lot of advice and ideas for things like classroom management and organization and I found some very helpful blogs that I still visit on a semi-regular basis.

I am a high school science teacher, but these blogs are good for any teacher of any age or subject. Here are some of my favs:

1. Teaching Sam and Scout: Elizabeth is a high school English teacher and blogs about her life as a mom in addition to her life as a teacher. She has great ideas for English lessons, but she also has great advice for classroom set up and organization. I went to her blog a lot as a new teacher for ideas when I got my first classroom and for setting up my first syllabus. She has great stuff for new teachers and great blog posts about teacher life in general for veteran teachers too!

2. The Effortful Educator: Blake Harvard teaches AP Psychology and his blog focuses on applying scientific research in memory and cognition in the classroom. Once of my goals for this school year is to incorporate more teaching techniques that are backed by research into my units, so I’ve been going to Blake’s blog a lot over the last couple of months. I follow a lot of teachers on Instagram where I feel that sometimes the focus can seem to be more on educational trends/buzzwords and lessons that look good on social media and classroom decorations than on actual teaching techniques and this blog has been a good balance to all of that. Don’t get me wrong, I love teachergram and I’ve gotten so many good ideas from it, but Blake’s blog reminds me to keep my focus on how can help my students actually LEARN and REMEMBER content rather than on finding lessons that will look good on Instagram.

3. The Learning Scientists: This a website and blog that is similar to the Effortful Educator in that it focusing on applying cognitive strategies backed by science in the classroom. There are so many great blog posts and resources for teachers about the science of learning, what we have learned about learning from research, and how to improve instruction. There are also great resources for students on how to make the most out of studying!

4. Leading, Learning, Questioning: Aaron Hogan is a principal and has written a book called Shattering the Perfect Teacher Myth which I have read and recommend if you are feeling burnt out in your teaching. His blog is also great for reading when you are feel disillusioned and need some inspiration. I also think his blog is especially great for ideas on getting to know students and build rapport with them from the first day of school to the last. Sometimes I like to read his blogs just to remind myself that building relationships with my students if one of the most important things I can do as a teacher.

5. Eat, Write, Teach: I love this blog so, so, so much and it’s probably the one I’ve read the most over the last 5 years. Stephanie is an English teacher, so she has great ideas in her content area, but she also has amazing ideas for classroom management and organization. She writes about technology, her classroom set up, and all sorts of new things that she tries out in her classroom each year. If you are a so-to-be teacher and want to know what teaching is really like, you need to read this blog. I appreciate how honest and authentic Stephanie is and I’ve gotten so much inspiration from what she does in her classroom. I can’t recommend this blog enough! Check her out!!

That’s it! I hope through these blogs you might be able to find some inspiration for your own classroom! Comment below if you following any of these blogs or have other recommendations!

Last month I shared some of the best new labs I did last year, and this month I wanted to share a couple more new things I tried in my classroom last school year. These are non-lab activities or organizational things and most are non-grade specific and could be used in any classroom!

1. Investigate the Teacher: This is an activity that I did with a few of my classes on the first day of school and I got this idea from the wonderful Abby Gross on Instagram. You can find here account here. At my school, our classes are slightly shorter than normal on the first day and there isn’t enough time to go over the syllabus or do a long activity. For this activity you give your students a form and they walk around your classroom, look for “evidence” that says something about you, and they try to draw conclusions about who you are. This activity is easy, gets kids out of their chairs on the first day, and gives me a chance to observe them and get to know them a little. They also get to know me as a teacher and a person. I really loved this and I think it helps set the tone of what my classroom is like and starts the process of relationship building. Abby (who created this resource) is an English teacher but the concept of collecting evidence and drawing conclusions works so well for a science classroom too! You can find this activity on TPT here.

2. Get to Know Students RIGHT AWAY: I read two great books last summer:
   Shattering the Perfect Teacher Myth by Aaron Horgan and Better Than Sticks and Carrots by Dominique Smith, Douglas Fisher, and Nancy Frey. Both books really emphasized the importance of building relationships with students as the foundation of classroom management and in order to building a caring and safe classroom environment. However the books both went further in suggesting that teachers need to intentionally build those relationships right at the beginning of the year and gave some practical solutions for how to do this. I took a student survey out of Sticks and Carrots, adapted it slightly, and then gave it to all my freshmen at the beginning of they year. Then I read every single one and I do think this helped me learn who my students were quickly. I liked this survey better than most that I have used in the past because I thought the questions were somewhat different from the typical get-to-know-you questions. Additionally, I took some ideas out of Aaron Horgan’s book about having positive, everyday interactions with students to build relationships. You can read more about this on his blog post here. I have always tried to get to know my students at the beginning of the year, but I truly think that putting positive relationships at the forefront of my mind this school year really made a difference.

3. Quizizz: If you are not using Quizizz in your classroom, you need to! This website was a game changer and saved me a lot of time this last year. Quizizz is an educational game website similar to Kahoot, but I think it is much easier to use and has more useful features. You can create multiple choice question quizzes for students that they can take individually at their own pace or the whole class can complete together similar to what you do with Kahoot. Here is why Quizizz is better though: the quizzes are much easier to make than on Kahoot, you can also assign these quizzes as homework where students can take the quiz as many times as they want until they get the grade they want, Quizizz generates a report for each student that you could import into your gradebook AND you can email this report to parents (I love this feature!), and it’s FREE! I used this in all my classes this year from freshmen Biology to Anatomy which was composed of all juniors and seniors and it was successful with all of them. You can also use this in a middle school classroom. (Sidenote: I have also Gimkit in my classroom and my students love it, however I find that the free version is harder to use and I didn’t really want to pay for the upgraded version) If you are curious about this tool, check out this YouTube video that I watched before I started using Quizizz.

4. Starbucks Study Time: This is an idea I got from Megan Forbes’s Instagram page @toocoolformiddleschool but I know a lot of other teachers do this too. Student are allowed to study or work on something independently and quietly while listening to their own music and eating snacks (if they are allowed to) just like they are at Starbucks. It’s a way to hopefully teach students how to work on their own just like they would if they were in college. I did not do this with my freshmen or sophomore students as most of my classes this year had a hard time holding themselves accountable with independent work, but I know a lot of middle school teachers who do this for short, 15 minute segments with success. I mostly used this with my Anatomy class of juniors and seniors and it worked great. Anatomy is so content heavy, that a day of independent study is great for them and many of them will be in college next year doing something like this everyday on their own. Additionally I have all my students fill out a form (pictured below) that explains how they used this time to study, what topics they feel confident about, and which topics they need to study more and I have them turn this into me at the end of class. I love using this time not just for students to work and study, but also for them to reflect on what they know. You can find Megan’s instructions for “Starbucks Time” here.

5. Switching Up My Biology Units: This year I took a page out of Rebecca’s wonderful blog https://itsnotrocketscienceclassroom.com and switched up the order of some my biology units. I used to teach ecology during the first semester right before Christmas, but this year I taught it at the end of the year right before genetics and heredity. My students typically always like the ecology and genetics units more than others and in her blog Rebecca argues that putting “fun” and activity-heavy units toward the end of year helps keep your students engaged during those last weeks of school and I have to say I agree. I think teaching these units in April and May kept everyone engaged and interested during the time of year when everyone is usually jumping off the walls. You can read more about this from Rebecca’s blog post here. I know this is biology specific, but even if you don’t teach biology and find that the end of the year is a struggle in your classes, is there a unit or activity you could save for the end of the year that would keep your students engaged? It might be worth switching things around!

And finally:

6. I Gave Less Homework: Let me begin by saying that I am not a no-homework type of teacher. I do give my students assignments and projects that we start in class and they are expected to finish on their own, but this year I gave fewer assignments than I have in previous years. This last year was my fifth year of teaching, and honestly, I was just tired and hitting the point of burn out. Additionally, I had four different classes to prep for and all that planning and grading really builds up. And I mean really, really builds up. I was tired of grading for hours on Sundays so I dropped a couple of the assignments I normally give and I do not regret it. A couple of years ago I NEVER WOULD HAVE DONE THIS. But as I get older I think it’s important to remember that as teachers we need to keep our teaching MANAGEABLE with the rest of our lives and what I was doing in previous years was not manageable. NEWSFLASH: it’s ok to give ourselves a break.

If you getting ready to go back to school or simply looking for new ideas for you classroom, I hope that you have found something here you can use and implement.

Have you recently tried a new activity in your classroom with success or have you tried one of things I listed above?  I would love to hear about it in the comments below!

With the 2018-2019 school year in the rearview mirror, I spent a little time last week reflecting on the year that was. In doing so, I realized that I am very proud of the effort I put into trying new activities in my classroom. However, this is also one of my greatest weakness as it also makes my life harder with extra planning and, with 4 different preps last year, it can drove me a little crazy too!!! After I reflected on all the new things I did this year, I wanted to bring to you some of the BEST new labs/activities I tried in my classroom in case you looking for new ideas for your classroom. (I know it’s only June, but I know someone out there is already thinking about next year!) Now,  not every new idea I tried this year worked out well, but the labs I’ve listed below are definitely keepers that I will be using in the years to come. Last year I taught Biology (regular level and an honors level, Earth Science, and Anatomy and I’ve included activities for each of these classes.

1. Bio: Bubble Gum Lab– I did this as my first lab in my Biology class this year, to introduce lab expectations and lab report requirements. In my regular Bio class, I gave my students several brands of chewing gum and told them to design an experiment that would find which brand blew the biggest bubble. In my Honors Bio class, I gave my students the different brands of gum, but they designed an experiment that tested anything they wanted. Some tests bubble size and some tested which brand held its flavor the longest. I’m so glad I did this lab because it’s inquiry-based, students learn and practice experimental design, it has easy set up, and it’s FUN! You can find more descriptions about this lab on Mrs. Miko’s wonderful blog: Refuse to Reinvent the Wheel (https://refusetoreinventthewheel.wordpress.com/2015/01/04/the-ultimate-bubble-blowing-champion/)
2. Bio: Balloon Diffusion Lab– Most years when I teach cell transport through the cell membrane (diffusion, osmosis, active transport), I do a lab where students put starch and water in a little piece of dialysis tubing, tying it off, put it in a glass of water, and drop iodine into the glass. The students then watch the iodine diffuse into the dialysis tube turning the tube blackish/blue. I really love this lab, BUT my biology class had some issues with appropriate lab behavior this year so did a balloon diffusion lab instead. I adapted this pdf from Flinn scientific (https://www.flinnsci.com/api/library/Download/d38c19c446cc40d9b52270ae3187e268) to fit my needs and worked pretty great. Essentially, you put different extracts into the balloons, the smells from the extracts diffuse out, and students try to get what smell each balloon contains. This particular class probably learned more about diffusion from a simple demonstration like this than from the dialysis tubing lab, and it was a great reminder for me that more complex labs don’t necessarily mean better learning.
3. Earth Science: Erosion Lab– In a similar vein to the balloon lab, I did this lab in attempt to make my life easier. (I had 4 different lab classes to prep for last year and sometimes you just need to make your life more MANAGEABLE amiright???) In my earth science classes I have tried so many different landslide labs when we learn about erosion. They have all been rather messy and time consuming and I am sick of hauling very heavy bags of sand from Home Depot into my classroom! This FREE lab from Ari at The Science Penguin (https://thesciencepenguin.com/2012/11/soil-the-capacity-to-retain-water.html) worked well and met my needs! This lab focuses on the water retention of different soils and not on erosion specifically, but I added some additional analysis questions and my high school students were able to draw connections between the two concepts.
4. Earth Science: Sedimentary Rock Lab– I’ve tried several times and without much

   

   success to make sedimentary rocks in plastic bottles or paper cups with different materials found outside. It takes too long for the materials to dry and turn into “rocks” and my students never really get a clear picture of sedimentary rock formation. This year I used a lab I found TPT from Mrs. Ruff (https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Sedimentary-Rock-Lab-Edible-Rock-Cycle-2085993) We were able to clearly see graded bedding in the first part of the lab and using graham crackers and sugar water to make sedimentary rocks in the second part of the lab gave my students a much better understanding of weathering, erosion, compaction, and cementation.

   

5. Anatomy: Banana Autopsy– At the beginning of the year in anatomy, it is very important for students to learn and retain anatomical terms. Throughout the year those words are used over and over again to describe the location of everything in the body, so this year I wanted to do more activities for students to practice using anatomical terms like lateral, medial, anterior, and posterior. This banana dissection lab was the MOST FUN! It’s cheap, not at all messy, and your students will love it. There are plenty of free resources you can find for this activity. I Googled “banana autopsy” and adapted one of the first resources I found to fit my needs.
6. Anatomy: Blood Vessel Lab– There were a lot of new things I tried i

   

   n my anatomy class this year but I am including this lab simply because this was something I had never done and I loved it! When teaching blood vessels, I usually have them learn how to take their blood pressure with a blood pressure cuff and then we just spend time looking at different pics of arteries, veins, and capillaries and talking about their differences and functions. However, this lab gives students a hands-on and visual way of studying capillaries and veins in a way I had never done before. The lab involves seeing your capillaries by looking through a tiny hole in a piece of paper and using a rudimentary way to measure venous blood pressure so students can see the difference compared to arterial pressure. You can find this lab on TPT here: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Arteries-Veins-and-Capillaries-Lab-585345. Here is the YouTube video I used to show my students how to see their own capillaries! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_W-IXqoxHA&feature=youtu.be.

If you have any questions about these activities, please feel free to comment below or send me a message. Hope you’re all having a super summer!

Oh October. This is often a hard month for teachers. The honeymoon phase of September is over. The true colors of your students are starting to show (for better or for worse). Kids start testing the systems you’ve put in place to keep your classroom running smoothly. The grading is starting to pile up and it starts to feel overwhelming. The days get shorter and darker and colder and more frustrating. Where I teach, we also have parent/teacher conferences, homecoming, and the first quarter ends in October, which adds a lot of pressure and stress. Every year I get to this month and I start feeling overwhelmed by the work load, managing student behavior, and balancing all the other activities and obligations that I have in October. I also have a very strong inner critic that gets me down when I fall behind in grading or lessons don’t go as planned or my students act out. All the positive mental energy I had in August and September to tell my self that I’m doing my best, seems to gone in October and I severely criticize myself for making mistakes.

So, if you’re like me, you need a reminder this month that the job you’re doing is incredibly important and all you can do is to do the best you can. Maybe, also like me, you need a reminder of how to keep yourself mentally focused in the midst of the busyness. The following are a couple of things I need to remind myself as I look back and reflect on this month.

Focus on what you can control. I really needed this reminder this month and I think it’s is huge for teachers no matter where you teach. There’s so much we don’t have control over: the students we have, the parents of our students, class sizes, standardized testing, the obligations and requirements of our districts and our administration.  Sometimes we allow these things to frustrate us so much that we lose sight of what we CAN do for our students. It’s not worth your mental energy to agonize over things you can’t change. Focus on your relationships with your students and how you engage and teach your students better each day. Focus on the things you do have control over.

When you make mistakes, silence your inner critic. In September I feel like I have laser focus on what needs to be done in my classroom and I’m very productive and energized when I’m at school. I’m so on top of everything that needs to get to done and remember to do all the things to keep myself organized. When October hits, I start to get more and more tired and I make more mistakes in the classroom and then I criticize myself. I tell myself that a good teacher wouldn’t forget to copy the quizzes for that day or make that grading mistake or forget to buy the supplies needed for the lab or get behind on grading. Of course, everyone forgets things and makes mistakes and I need to remember this. Once I realized that I was criticizing myself so much, I am learning how to stop myself from thinking these critical thoughts trying to use more positivity self talk. I need to remind myself that I don’t have to hold myself to an impossible standard.

Have a plan for bad days. As teachers we usually do a good job of planning and being proactive to avoid problematic situations, but we should also make plans for what we do when we have bad days as school. I’m not talking about how we handle discipline, I’m talking about how we handle ourselves on days when a kid has a melt down or you have a melt down or you have an unpleasant interaction with a colleague or on days when EVERYTHING SEEMS TO GO WRONG. How can we handle these days in a healthy way rather than criticizing ourselves for making a mistake or angrily venting to another colleague or going home and eating junk food? Maybe it’s sitting between classes and taking a few deep breaths or going to a quiet place and counting to ten or going for a walk after school. Do what works for you. I’m in my 5^thyear of teaching and still learning how to do this. I think that anticipating and planning for bad days before they happen makes them less awful and coping with them in a healthy way keep can keep up from getting burnt out.

Give yourself and your students and your colleagues a fresh start each day. Try your hardest to forget about what happened yesterday and start each day a new. No matter how frustrated you get with the people or situations around you at work, don’t hold onto them. Start each day like it everyone gets a fresh start including yourself. Put on a smile (even if it’s just a fake smile) and focus on your students and being the best teacher you can be for them.

If you’re feeling anything like I have this month, I hope you know that you are doing a great job. Teaching can seem impossible sometimes, but you can do it. Don’t give up.

Freshmen. You either love them or you hate them right? If you have taught freshmen, you know that they can be frustrating and tiring to teach. For example, I give my freshmen a quiz every Friday and I remind them pretty much every single day. Yet, if I had a quarter for every time a student came into my class on a Friday and said, “What? We have a quiz??? What’s on it?” I would be able to take a nice vacation to Aruba.

Sound familiar? Ever since my first year of teaching I have taught mostly freshmen and those years have helped me to better anticipate the freshmen problems that frustrate me and I’ve developed better procedures to help my freshmen succeed throughout the year (and keep me sane!).

For some background, I teach in a private school and about one third of our freshmen class come from our middle school, a third from public school, and a third from other private middle schools. I also teach in a densely populated area where there is wide variety of public, private, and charter schools. All that’s to say that my freshmen are coming from all sorts of places with different procedures and expectations and it can make the transition to high school difficult. My freshmen students typically have a very large range of academic abilities and helping them all be successful can be challenging. If you feel like you might teaching similar students or daily feel frustrated by your freshmen, the following tips might be helpful to you!

1. Be patient.

Many freshmen are still like middle schoolers when they start high school. They zone out, they day dream, they don’t listen to the directions you are giving them and it’s extremely frustrating. We’ve all been there. My biggest advice for teaching freshmen is to anticipate that freshmen need a lot of help and patience transitioning to a high school environment. When you can anticipate this instead of expecting freshmen to remember everything single thing on your syllabus you can avoid some of the frustration. Anticipate that you will need to repeat directions. Anticipate that you will need to remind them of procedures and due dates several times. Anticipate that they won’t get everything right the first time and be patient with them. It takes time for kids to transition to a new school and a new schedule. Obviously at some time during the year freshmen need to start being accountable for hearing and remembering information in class without being reminded of it a million times, but at the beginning year I find that I am able to build better relationships with students when I patiently repeat things (even if it is the 10^thtime I have to repeat myself) rather than getting annoyed showing them how frustrated I am with them for not listening or forgetting.

2. Start out the year with easier assessments to build confidence.

Sometimes I get kids who have been “bad” at school their whole lives. Sometimes I get kids who are way below reading and math benchmarks for their grade. While there are certain classes in which I give challenging quizzes and homework right off the bat, I find that with freshmen, I have had better success getting kids to “buy into” the class by making homework and assessments a little easier and then build them up to be more challenging as we go throughout the year. Imagine yourself as a student at a new school with new teachers who don’t know you teaching you a subject you don’t understand. At the beginning of the year you bomb all the quizzes and the homework and you start to feel like you can’t do well in this class so you give up before you’ve even really started. I see this happen every year. In my experience I find that giving freshmen some slow pitches at the beginning of the year builds their confidence before we get to anything too challenging. When my students feel like they can succeed in class, they are more likely to be engaged.

3. Consider short attention spans.

Every year I feel like my freshmen have shorter and shorter attention spans. When I sit my students down to a short lecture at the beginning of the year, you would think that I was torturing them! 14 year olds have brains that are still developing and a lot of them have an attention span of 15 minutes max. I truly believe that high schoolers need to be able to sit down and successful listen to a lecture and take good notes, but many freshmen are not at that level yet. Just like beginning runners don’t start off running 10Ks, many freshmen are not ready to sit and listen to a 40 minute lecture. Beginning runners start with short distances and gradually build their endurance as their muscles and cardiovascular systems get stronger until they can run 6.2 miles. At the beginning of the year I try to break up my lecture into 10-15 minute chunks. As we go throughout the year, we get into a routine, and we can build up to being able to lecture for longer. But at the beginning of the year I keep my lectures short.

4. Consider adopting a gracious late work policy

Late work policies can be a controversial topic and many of us have late work policies chosen for us by our administrators, however if you are able, consider adopting a gracious late work policy for your freshmen. When I first started teaching, I had the standard late work is accepted one day late for half credit policy. However, I was finding that many of my students, were not used to doing homework or studying, and they were getting overwhelmed by the work that was getting thrown at them. I also found that kids just stopped doing homework if they knew they couldn’t get better than a 50% or if they did turn it in late, their homework grades weren’t reflecting what they actually scored on the assignment. Their grade was simply reflecting that it was late. While I don’t give freshmen very much homework, I currently use a system that I got from refusetoreinventthewheel.com for late work. I accept late work up until the day of the unit test for full credit. However, for every late assignment they turn in, I take 2 points away from a separate “On Time Homework” grade that resets each quarter. This has been a game changer for me. For me, more students end up completing the assignments and their grades are more reflective of what they are actually doing while still showing how many times they turn late work in.

5. Remember that freshmen are not done growing and changing.

My mom once told me that we shouldn’t think of middle or high schoolers as complete adults and she is completely right. I think sometimes we as teachers get really frustrated with freshmen because we are expecting them to be more mature and developed than they physically are. And that’s not their fault. We can’t expect our freshmen to be college ready or act like little, mature adults because they are only 14! I feel like we do so much hand wringing about “kids these days” and how they won’t be ready for college or the real world. But freshmen have so much growing and changing and learning to do before that! That’s what these 4 years of high school are for. Yes, freshmen are immature and forget everything and are frustrating but most of them won’t be like this forever. On my most frustrating days when the immaturity of my freshmen is really wearing me down I to remember that they are still growing. In the mean time I can give them my patience and a fresh start each day.

We all teach in different places and with different students so I would love to hear what you do with your freshmen! What are your best tips for working with this crazy and special age group?