Ten Rules for Teachers Who Would Like to Still Be Teachers in June
Ask any teacher who has been in a classroom longer than five years what they wish someone had told them in the beginning, and you will get one of two answers. The first is a laugh. The second is a very long pause, followed by, "Where do I start?"
In my 18 years of teaching, I have seen education mandates come and go like haircuts. I have taught during a pandemic, through three curriculum overhauls, under six principals, and beside colleagues who have become closer than family. I have also taught an entire math lesson with a sticker on my forehead that a kindergartener put there during morning meeting. Nobody told me. Not one of my twenty-eight children mentioned it. Their loyalty, frankly, was impressive.
That day taught me something I have been trying to teach new teachers ever since.
This job is not what you think it is going to be.
It is harder, funnier, sadder, and more important than any orientation slideshow can prepare you for.
So here, in no particular order of urgency and in every order of love, are ten rules I wish someone had handed me on day one.
1. You do not teach a subject or a grade first. You teach children.
In my first year, I was going to be the Fourth-Grade Math Teacher. Capital letters. I had color-coded binders. I had a poster of Pythagoras. I had a whole personality built around fractions.
Then a kid named Marcus threw up on the fractions.
Not out of protest, mind you, though I would have respected that. He had the flu, and he had been trying to hold it together all morning because his mom told him not to miss another day. And there I was, mid-sentence about equivalent denominators, watching a child fall apart in real time.
You are not a Math Teacher. You are not a Fifth-Grade Teacher. You are a person who has been handed a room full of small humans, each one dragging an invisible suitcase full of stuff you cannot see. Teach them first. The fractions will follow. Marcus, bless him, is now an accountant. He did learn fractions.
2. Progress is more important than perfection.
Perfection is a scam invented by people who do not have to teach a phonics lesson right after a fire drill.
Your bulletin board does not have to look like it was hand-lettered by monks. Your lesson does not have to end with a standing ovation. Some days a win is that everyone left with the same number of shoes they came in with. Some days a win is that you did not cry until you got to your car.
I once spent an entire Sunday laminating a behavior chart with individually cut magnetic stars. By Wednesday it was on the floor, missing three stars, and one child had eaten a magnet. Progress, not perfection. The kid is fine. The chart is not.
3. Ask for help before you need rescuing.
There is a specific breed of new teacher who believes asking for help is a moral failing. I know this because I was him. I once tried to plan an entire unit on the water cycle without acknowledging to a single colleague that I did not, in fact, fully understand the water cycle.
By Friday, a seven-year-old asked me where clouds come from and I said, and I quote, "the sky." She looked at me the way a Supreme Court justice looks at a bad lawyer.
Your colleagues have been where you are. They have taught the water cycle. They have survived October, which is the longest month in education and scientifically has forty-seven days. Ask them things. Ask them early. Asking for help in September is called collaboration. Asking for help in April is called a wellness check.
4. Correct the behavior. Protect the dignity.
There is a version of classroom management that involves yelling a child's full government name across the room while everyone stares. Do not be that person. That person peaks in year two and then becomes a cautionary tale told in the teachers' lounge.
Children, like the rest of us, will do almost anything to avoid public humiliation, including doubling down on the exact behavior you are trying to stop. Correction in private, celebration in public. Whisper the redirect. Save the eyebrow for later. A kid can hear "that choice isn't working, let's try again" a hundred times if you say it without an audience. Say it once with an audience and you have made an enemy for the year, and possibly a viral TikTok.
5. Repair after you rupture. Adults model apology.
You are going to lose it. Maybe not today. Maybe not this week. But somewhere around the second week of March, a child will ask you for the third time if they can go to the bathroom while you are actively bleeding from a paper cut, and you will snap.
The rupture is not the end of the world. The refusal to repair it is.
Go back. Say the words. "I raised my voice earlier and that wasn't fair to you. I'm sorry." Watch what happens. Watch a nine-year-old's entire nervous system exhale. You have just taught a lesson worth more than any read-aloud you had planned. Kids do not need teachers who never mess up. They have never met one of those. They need teachers who show them what it looks like to mess up and come back with grace. That is the entire curriculum of being a human, and you are teaching it whether you meant to or not.
6. Assume your teammate is carrying something you cannot see.
Your grade partner did not respond to your email about the field trip forms. Before you draft the passive-aggressive follow-up, consider: her mother is sick, her landlord is threatening eviction, her kid has a fever, and she just found out the copier is broken again.
You will not know any of this. You do not need to know any of this. You just need to know it is possible.
The teachers' lounge is a masterclass in restraint if you let it be. Everyone in that room is holding something. Extend the grace you would want extended to you on the day you forgot to submit attendance because your cat died. And yes, that specifically happened to me. His name was Winston. He was a legend.
7. Families are experts on their child. You are an expert on the classroom. Both are true.
Some of the worst parent conferences I have ever attended started with a teacher saying, in essence, "let me explain your kid to you." Reader, they did not go well.
That parent has known that child since before that child had a face. They have seen every fever, every meltdown, every weird obsession with trains. You have known that child since the second Tuesday of September. Show up with humility. Ask before you tell. "Here is what I am seeing in the classroom. What are you seeing at home?" is a sentence that has saved my career more times than I can count.
You are not competing. You are collaborating. The kid is the point. Everyone at that table wants the same thing, even when it does not feel like it.
8. Protect one weekend day fully. No email, no planning, no guilt.
I once graded essays on a beach. In a swimsuit. With a red pen. A seagull ate my sandwich, and honestly, I deserved it.
You cannot pour from an empty cup, and you especially cannot pour from a cup you have been furiously refilling with cold work-email dregs at eleven p.m. on a Sunday. Pick a day. Sunday, Saturday, Tuesday if you are eccentric. Do not open the email. Do not "just quickly" plan Monday. Do not feel guilty about the pile in your bag. The pile will still be there tomorrow. The pile is very committed to its role.
Rest is not a reward for finishing. Nothing in this job ever finishes. Rest is the thing that lets you come back.
9. The relationship is the curriculum. Nothing you teach lands until students believe you see them.
You can have the most rigorous, standards-aligned, data-driven unit plan in the tri-state area. It will bounce off a child like a Nerf ball if that child does not believe you actually see them.
Learn how they take their morning. Notice the new haircut. Remember that Jaylen's grandmother has been sick, and ask about her on Monday without making a big thing of it. Kids can smell performative caring from three zip codes away. Real caring is quieter. It is remembering. It is showing up. It is the small stuff repeated over months until a child thinks, this one is safe, this one is mine.
Then, and only then, does the phonics lesson stick.
10. The work is never finished. That is the point. Give yourself grace.
Here is the trick nobody tells you at the induction workshop. You will never be caught up. You will never grade the last paper. You will never plan the perfect lesson. You will never be the teacher you were going to be in July when you bought the planner with the little tabs.
And that is not failure. That is the shape of the job.
Teaching is not a project you complete. It is a practice you return to, imperfect and tired and sometimes hiding in a supply closet, and you get to try again tomorrow. The unfinishedness is not a bug. It is the whole design. It means there is always another chance, another kid, another moment where you get it right in a way you did not yesterday.
Give yourself the grace you would give any nine-year-old learning to ride a bike. You are also learning. You are always learning. That is the job.
So here is what I want you to do.
Take this list. Fold it, screenshot it, scribble it on a sticky note, do whatever you do with things you want to keep. Then go into your classroom on Monday and try just one of these rules. Not all ten. One.
Try it in October when everything feels like too much. Try it in February when you have forgotten your own name. Try it in June when a kid tells you that you were their favorite, and you have to look away because you do not want them to see you cry.
That is the job. That is the whole job. Not the paperwork, not the pacing calendar, not the sticker on your forehead. The kids in front of you, and the person you are becoming while you teach them.
They are waiting for you. They do not need you to be perfect.
They just need you to show up.
Go.
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