Dear Rookie Teacher,
What they don't understand and never tell you about teaching is that when you're a teacher, you're also a coach and a guidance counselor, and a nurse, and a mother, and a data tracker, and an event planner.
And when you start your first day, you expect to feel like a teacher, but you don't. You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today. And you don't feel like you're a real teacher at all. You feel like a pretend teacher, a phony, a teenager on a first date. And you are a real teacher- but it's buried underneath all the other insecurities that make you feel like you aren't.
Like some days you might say something stupid and that’s the part of you that’s still
inexperienced. Or maybe some days you might need to run to the teacher down the hall because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s still learning. And maybe one day when you are seasoned maybe you will still need to cry like you're still brand new and that's okay. That’s what I tell other teachers when they're scared and need to cry. Maybe you're feeling like a newbie.
Because the way you grow experience is kind of like an onion or like rings inside a tree trunk...each year fits inside the next one. That's what being a seasoned teacher is like.
But when you're new you don't feel like a teacher. Not right away. It takes a few weeks, sometimes even months before you say I am a teacher when they ask you. And you don't feel like a smart teacher, not until you've taught for at least three years. That's just the way it is.
Only today I know you wish you weren't a newbie with nerves rattling inside you like pennies in a tin Band Aid box. Today, I know you wish you were experienced because if you had ten years under your belt you would have known what to say when Admin put the burden of school advisory on you. You would have known how to tell them you weren't ready instead of sitting there with that confused look on your face and nothing coming out.
"Who wants to be on the school advisory committee?"
"Not me," says everybody.
"Somebody has to do it," he keeps saying.
And maybe it's because you are skinny and young, but those other teachers throw you straight under the bus, "I think the new guy should be on the school advisory committee." And the principal agreed and wrote your name down on the paper.
Suddenly, you are feeling sick and that's the part of you that remembers you have only been teaching five days.
I know you wish you were invisible, but you're not. You're new, and it's your first week and you are crying on the inside.
You wish it was your third year, your fifth year, anything other than your first year. Because today you want to be far away already like a runaway balloon like a tiny o' in the sky- so tiny you have to close your eyes to see it.
Does anyone remember what it was like to be new, to feel like you don't belong, to want to float away?
-CDB
(An Ode to Sandra Cisneros , short story "Eleven" from the perspective of a new teacher)