A friend of mine—a new teacher who just started recently—is having a rough week.  We had a long talk about teaching in general and how to get past the rough spots.  I agreed to put some of my advice for my friend into a blog in hopes that it might help someone else out, so for better or worse, here you go:

1) Wise Up.

Deaf Education isn’t just about imparting knowledge (which is what you were probably taught in college).  Deaf Education is also about the politics of being right.  From the moment you accept a job as a teacher, you are surrounded by dozens of people who not only think they’re right… they want to prove it.  Some have been burning to prove it for decades.  And some, long before you ever shook hands with them in the hall and said “hi,” had no qualms whatsoever about using you to do exactly that.

2) Recognize the difference between an administrator and a Merry-Go-Round.

I once worked in a school where a kid started whirling around inside of the classroom with a sharpened pencil in each hand.  This was only his latest disruption in a string of increasingly dangerous screw-ups.  For safety’s sake, I sent him to the office.  Before that same period was up—no exaggeration, this was less than five minutes later—the office sent him right back.  The principal felt the situation had been defused, you see, and the kid really just needed a time-out.  I was told to focus on developing some alternative classroom management skills, because my current approach wasn’t really benefitting anyone.  So in time I did develop such a skill: I learned to recognize which administrators I could trust to do their jobs, and which administrators I could trust to hand a shotgun back to a ten year-old if they thought the act would help them avoid a confrontation with Mom and Dad. 

3) Accept that even people you don’t like or agree with personally might also be good teachers.

Just because certain other teachers don’t like or respect you, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t know what they’re doing in a classroom.  Don’t reject this possibility out of pride, arrogance, or insecurity.  Accept it and make the realization your strength.  After all, if it’s true, then the reverse must logically also be true: The fact that they don’t like you doesn’t automatically make you incompetent.

4) Realize that there’s such a thing as a bad student. 

There’s a saying that goes like this: “There are no bad students, there are only bad teachers.”  My take on that?  True, but false.  The younger a student is and the less he can think for himself, the more his “bad” behavior is probably a product of bad teaching (note: not all teachers work in schools).  The older he gets, however, the more his bad habits are a product of his own continuous choices.  Once he gets past kindergarten, he’s been warned.  He has been told to finish his homework, be respectful, and not bully others.  If he arrives in your classroom and still hasn’t figured out how to do these things, it’s unlikely that his troubles are the sole result of your being too stern with him or your failure to inspire him. 

5) EROEI—live or die by it.

“Energy Returned on Energy Invested” is a brutal little equation of efficiency that demands sustainability, and it will not be denied.  If you’re putting more effort into teaching your students than they’re putting into learning from you (or conversely, if they’re a classroom full of intellectual dynamos and you’re slogging day after day through the equivalent of a mental tar pit), someone is eventually going to run out of gas.  People ultimately have bad weeks and rough spots in Deaf Education because someone has been putting too much in and someone else hasn’t been getting enough out—both usually for far too long.  So if the overall enterprise has recently started feeling like a giant net loss of energy… now you know why.