1. Treat your students like adults, but don't expect them to act that way.

2. Use the least amount of intervention possible to maintain a productive classroom environment.

3. Learn how to distinguish the important things from the things no one will remember in a month. (or in a year, or in ten years...)

4. Learn to say no to chaperoning dances, field trips, and other after-school activities. Say yes when you have the time and an interest in the activity.

5. Teaching at the school you graduated from brings problems with it a beginning teacher doesn't need.

6. Don't flirt with students.

7. Sarcasm may make you popular with some of your students but it makes it awful hard to teach the targets of your wit.

8. There is always more work than you have time for.

9. Every August take a day to create a written list of one-year and three-year goals for personal improvement. Put them in a place where you can see them often.

10. Be active in a professional organization-- read the journal, write an article, attend their conference, make a presentation, serve on a committee.

11. Those that can, teach. Continue to do the subject that you teach.

12. Treat every form and request for information, no matter how stupid or silly, as if it was your job application.

13. Get some classroom experience before you begin your master's degree program.

14. Plan the completion of your master's degree program well in advance of the date your temporary certificate expires.

15. Learn the laws that apply to your rights and responsibilities in the classroom.

16. Have classroom rules and enforce than consistently from time to time and from person to person.

17. Learn to manage your administrative tasks with a computer.

18. Grade papers as soon as you get them. Few things are as depressing as a pile of ungraded papers.

19. Trust me: you and your friends were not as mature and sophisticated in high school as you remember yourselves to be.

20. You cannot take what you know and place it intact in your students' minds. You can only create experiences and help your students make sense in their own way.

21. There is nothing you can do to make every student like you.

22. While it's impossible not to have favorite students, it is possible to keep favoritism from affecting your decision-making.

23. Every teacher is a reading teacher.

24. Trust students, but don't underestimate what claims their parent's lawyers can dream up.

25. Watch the movie Teachers.. See how you react near the end when Nick Nolte turns to the union leader and says, "I'm a teacher!"

26. Nobody ever got rich teaching school and nobody ever will.

27. Your classroom doesn't belong to you so take better care of it than you would if it did.

28. Think about how your students would learn your subject if they weren't in school.

29. Learn to motivate your students the same way someone motivated you- in a class you didn't like.

30. Extra-curricular activities will enliven you and suck the energy out of you at the same time.

31. Eat right, take a daily vitamin and get enough sleep.

32. Students will bring every communicable disease to school with them. Get a flu shot and every other available vaccination.

33. Assume any time you lend a personal possession to a student or fellow teacher that you will never see it again.

34. It is better to believe a student who is lying to you than it is not to believe a student who is telling you the truth. The former situation reflects poorly on the student, the latter situation reflects poorly on you.

35. Keep track of your school keys.

36. Get on the good side of the head secretary and the custodians.

37. Be friendly with your students but don't try to be one of their friends.

38. Don't live within walking distance of the school where you teach.

39. Don't hang out in any bar in the district where you teach.

40. Listen to your students. Check your understanding of them by putting their idea in your own words and ask them if that's what they meant.

41. Dress like you are the person in charge and remember that school is not a fashion show.

42. Call students by their first names.

43. Decorate your classroom enough to be stimulating but not so much as to be a distraction.

44. Have an emergency lesson plan for your unexpected absences.

45. Have a 15-20 minute activity always ready for the day of a short assembly or long fire drill. This could be a problem-solving situation or current events activity.

46. Learn to ignore some things your students go out of their way to make you aware of.

47. When a student says something that can be taken two ways, use the most innocent interpretation. Just continue the discussion without comment.

48. Draw as much information out of your students as you can during a lesson.

49. Learn first aid.

50. Keep records. The best defense against a liability lawsuit is having well documented classroom practice.

51. Keep your watch set on school time.

52. Start teaching immediately when the class period begins.

53. Don't discuss students in the faculty room.

54. Don't discuss one student with another student. (Listen-- but don't discuss.)

55. That student who is sleeping in your class may have stayed up all night out of fear of what might happen if he/she went to sleep.

56. Statistics say that one student in the average class you teach has been physically or sexually abused AND YOU USUALLY DON'T KNOW WHO IT IS. That neat, clean, cheery, middle class student may be living a nightmare. Don't add to it.

57. Never punish a group for what some student(s) did.

58. Never use physical contact to enforce your will.

59. Never consider having sexual relations with a student.

60. Submit all paperwork on time.

61. Get some regular exercise.

62. Never leave the school before the last student for whom you are responsible.

63. If you coach, always attend to an injury right away. There are parents in the stands who will watch to see how well you're taking care of their child.

64. At bake sales, candy sales, etc. donate a buck or two in order to not buy anything. (You really don't need those calories)

65. Don't bad mouth the administration or school board to your students.

66. Work toward excellence, not perfection.

67. Stay home when you're sick.

68. Never call in sick when you're not.

69. Work on the timing of your lessons. Try to finish as close to the end of the period as possible. Real-life experience is the only way to learn this.

70. Your first job is to help your students be successful in life, not to teach as much content in as little time as possible.

71. Get your act together then share your act with a student teacher.

72. It's easier to teach your classes yourself than it is to do an effective job with a student teacher.

73. Field trip permission forms are not worth the paper they're written on.

74. Give your tests and written directions to a colleague to read for clarity.

75. Learn what your administrator's "bottom line"is. Sometimes you can do whatever you want in your classroom as long as your desks are in a straight line.

76. Don't make threats when you're angry. Say, "If you don't do as I ask, I will have to discipline you." Calm down then decide on the penalty that fits the infraction.

77. Make your department chair's and principal's jobs easy.

78. Never make a joke about a student's name.

79. Be aware of gender and cultural differences among your students.

80. Find out if your colleagues have a reason for why they do what they do in their classes.

81. Volunteer to write regent's exam questions. There is no better insight into how the tests work and how they're regarded by SED personnel.

82. Be a positive person. Every day is golden for someone with the vision to see it.

83. Never denigrate the teaching profession. It is a wonderful career for someone who is a realist about what teaching is and an idealist about what teaching can be.

84. Travel. Find out what is taught and how it is taught in other countries. But find out first hand.

85. Have good manners and expect them of your students.

86. Have at least one good professional friend with whom you can talk about how teaching could be.

87. Try to figure out the reason behind why a student chronically misbehaves in your class.

88. Never love a job so much that you wouldn't quit it.

89. When the senior faculty let you serve on and chair all of the committees, don't flatter yourself. Limit your committee activity.

90. Screw up trying rather than fail due to inaction.

91. Sometimes people reinvent the wheel, but for good reason. People will refuse a perfectly good wheel given to them but love the same idea if they make it up. Ownership is a big deal to teachers.

92. Any good idea given to teachers who don't believe in it will fail.

93. Everybody who was ever a student thinks they know how to teach effectively.

94. You have absolutely no idea what your students will remember of your class in ten years. They forget the Civil War but remember a kind word (or a put-down).

95. Most administrators who seem to forget what it was to be a teacher was a teacher who went into administration to be an administrator who remembered what it was like to be a teacher.

96. Society could not afford the bill of paying teachers what they are worth.

97. Mother Theresa once said, "We can do no great things, only small things with great love."

98. There is no such thing as luck.

99. Complex problems have simple, easy-to-understand, wrong answers.

100. Teachers considered Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, and Guiseppi Verdi failures. Teachers tend to be impressed by performance and equate it with potential-- these are not the same things.

101. Parents complain schools aren't what they used to be. But schools are what they used to be. That's what's wrong with them. (Apologies to Noel Coward for usurping his observation of the opera.)

102. Industry is a better horse to ride than genius (Walter Lippmann). That's especailly true in teaching, education is the extraordinary use of ordinary knowledge.

103. There is both an art and a science to teaching..

104. If a student has to ask, "Why do we have to learn this?" he or she won't understand the answer. Establish relevance first in every lesson.

105. Find a good book on time management and put it into use.

106. When dealing with an angry parent, calmly try to get them to see things from your position and try to see the situation from their position.

107. When doing #106, you'd better make sure that if they do see things from your position, it's a reasonable one.

108. No matter how good you are, Numbers 106 and 107 won't always work.

109. Unions are a necessary evil.

110. A necessary evil is still evil.

111. Grades are a necessary evil. If you think that you are capable of knowing how much your students know about your subject to the nearest one percent you are seriously deluding yourself.

112. School boards are a necessary evil.

113. Teaching does not require the same intellectual demands as nuclear engineering.

114. Number 113 notwithstanding, teaching is not common sense. Teachers have to know what makes an effective classroom so as to accomplish #115.

115. A public school teacher's job is to reach the widest group of students. Your life represents a narrow and atypical kind of student.

116. You will wish your voice could be heard half as well as the students who are whispering while you are talking.

117. Watch Dead Poets Society. Write about what the carpe diem scene in the school hallway reminds you of.

118. Try to see if the teachers who demand that administrators share decision-making power with them ever share decision-making power with their students.

119. No matter how good you were this year, remember, next year can be even better.

120. There are three kinds of teachers: those who have had problems with classroom management, those who are now having problems with classroom management and those who will have problems with classroom management. You didn't think this was going to be easy did you?

121. A knight armed for every danger will surely fall in the river and drown. Don't spend your time worrying about things that might not happen.

122. Since you will have to give grades, remember-- before you are entitled to critize someone else, even positively, you have to show first that you care about them as a person.

123. Remember: 30 days hath September, April, June and November. All the rest have 31, except for February which has 80!

124. Trying to outshout a noisy class is like trying to teach a pig to sing. It won't work, you'll make yourself hoarse, and it only annoys the pig.

125. Take care of your feet. Buy good quality shoes (comfortable not high-fashion), change them when you get home, don't wear the same pair two days in a row.

126 Never bring up a problem without suggesting a solution.

127. Long hours don't mean anything. Results are all that matter.

128. Write down good ideas.

129. Become a morning person.

130. There are no secrets.

131. Your students aren't therapists. Don't unload your troubles in front of them.

132. Write thank you notes.

133. Never give experienced teachers your ideas on how to do things until you have asked them for suggestions first.

134. Never leave your purse or valuables out or in an unlocked drawer

135. Allow students to feel ownership of the classroom, so that they will then also feel responsible for stewardship.

136. Never give an assignment that you haven't thought carefully about how to grade.

137. If you dread grading an assignment, that is a good indication that you shouldn't have assigned it.

138. Communicate expectations to parents soon and often.

139. Call a parent before they have a chance to call you.

140. Dates and statistics are no more history than a skeleton is a person.

141. Computation is to mathematics what grammar is to writing.

142. Hoard all the red construction paper you can at the beginning of the year(It will be all gone by Dec or certainly by Feb)

143. Bring cookies to the secretary and the janitor on every special occasion(You will never have better support)

144. Even as you are learning to be an effective teacher, start getting ready for your next career.

145. State or national standards never made a good teacher out of a bad teacher.

146. Have a sound reason for everything you do in your classroom based on a personal theory of teaching and learning. It will help protect you from fads, self-doubt, irate parents, and trend-following administrators. (Oh it won't eliminate any of these, but it will help a little.)

147. Remember, teaching is no more a collection of tricks than a house is a pile of stones. You have to create a structure out of the rubble.

Thanks to Cathy Yeotis, Wichita State University, for numbers 133, 134, and 135; Larry Flick, Washington State University Tri-Cities, for 136 to 139; Karen Brutzman, Richland, WA for 140 (it reminded me of 141); and Judy Egelston-DoDD, NTID at RIT for 142 & 143.

A great teacher never strives to explain his vision-- he simply invites you to stand beside him and see it for yourself. (The Reverend R. Inman)

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. (Daniel J. Boorstin)

We learn by doing and reflecting on what we do. (John Dewey)

Between truth and the search for truth, I opt for the second. (Bernard Berenson)

Telling is not teaching. Listening is not learning.

To teach is to learn twice. (Joseph Joubert)

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations. (Patricia Neal)

Ignorance is the womb of monsters. (Henry Ward Beecher)

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be ignited. (Plutarch)

Without education, we are in the horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously. (G.K. Chesterton)

The people who organize the teaching of teachers ought to understand that to really train a skilled teacher is a 20-year job. (Leon Lederman)

Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach. Those that can't teach, teach teachers.

I never let my education get in the way of my learning. (Mark Twain)

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly. (Montaigne)

You don't have to think too hard when you talk to teachers. (J.D. Salinger)

If the teacher is not a strong moral force in the community, to whom shall we turn? (John Goodlad)

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. (H.G. Wells)

God made the Idiot for practice, then He made the School Board. (Mark Twain)

It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete. (Norman Cousins)

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. (H.G. Wells)