Forty Things I’ve Learned So Far

Hey there, colleague — happy Leap Day! Tomorrow is March 1, which means (as my students like to remind me) that it's Justin Bieber's birthday. And that means, it's my birthday, too. So in honor of the great occasion of Justin Bieber's birthday, today I'm going to share forty things I've learned during my teaching career. (Forty is a randomly selected number, trust me.)

Starting today, I'm also offering a birthday month discount on some of my core products. From now until March 31*, refire your teacher heart with any or all of the following:

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*I've noticed in my career that March is the best time of year to start a new PD. The end is near, but not too near. Teaching's not always easy at this point, but it's very routine. Perfect place to insert new ideas, remind myself of fundamentals, sharpen my edges, be encouraged or refired.

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All right, on to the content.

When I started this blog, I was twenty-eight years old. Now I'm a day from forty. Here are forty things I've learned along the journey, forty things I'm fairly sure of. Take what helps, leave what doesn't.

40 Things I've Picked Up Over the Years (In No Particular Order)

1. It's more than okay to take a nappucino during your prep hour. (<– My children love to laugh at the videos I make on YouTube, but none make them laugh harder than that nappucino one.)
2. Resting well is a skill, just like teaching well. Both take about as much work and practice to gain proficiency.
3. Being an average lesson planner with an expert understanding of student motivation is better than being an expert lesson planner with an average understanding of student motivation. But the goal in a teaching career is to develop expertise in both.
4. The best way to feel confident in your lesson plans is to feel confident in your knowledge of the fundamentals of how learning works.
5. The Five Key Beliefs pyramid explains and addresses about 99% of student motivation issues I encounter.
6. There's always that persnickety 1%.
7. It's better for my students and my mental health to try to be a good teacher than to try to be the best teacher. Best is a fool's errand; good is golden.
8. Teaching is filled with paradoxes: statements of truth that are illogical but nonetheless true.
9. One paradox: I've got tons of influence on my students while they're with me, and yet I control a very small portion of the factors that influence my students during a given lesson.
10. Another paradox: my work with students each year affects the trajectory of their lives, and yet I am a very small factor in the trajectory my students' lives take.
11. If I can be 1% of the reason why a student goes on to flourish long-term, I consider my work with that student a wild and rewarding success.
12. A major reason our students learn so little is that we have them write so infrequently across the school day. This is almost entirely due to misunderstanding what writing is and how learning works.
13. I'm not suited for all the jobs in education, and so I can be grateful for the folks who do the jobs I couldn't happily do — even when they do them less well than I think I would if I were them.
14. Everyone I meet is a mostly invisible creature. (See p. 1-2 in The Will to Learn for more on this.)
15. This reality that people are mostly invisible is the surest way I've found for growing in my appreciation for and enjoyment of and curiosity about other people.
16. Every parent wants a good life for their children.
17. Most parents are at least a little afraid that they don't have what it takes to help their children grow into good lives.
18. Helping children with school is a real and stressful challenge for most parents. School is overwhelming.
19. The point of school is to promote the long-term flourishing of young people.
20. The best way schools can promote long-term flourishing in young people is by helping them grow in mastery of all the school subjects, ranging from reading to art to music to science. Hard-won mastery yields all kinds of “real world” benefits.
21. People grow in “soft skills” (AKA character strengths, noncognitive skills, etc.) mostly as a byproduct of doing hard things (e.g., learning and applying new math concepts; writing essays; reading novels; learning about the physical world).
22. The two most useful pieces of technology for getting better as a teacher are the camera and the stopwatch. The camera — for filming segments of your lesson and watching yourself afterwards. The stopwatch — for timing segments of your lesson to keep yourself honest about how you use time.
23. The skillset to improve first when you start watching film of yourself teaching is authoritative teacher presence. It is so simple and powerful that it makes me laugh with delight, even as I write this.
24. If you don't set test dates at the start of the unit (even better, at the start of the course), the unit will always take longer and you'll always end up not getting through the material.
25. Romeo and Juliet can be taught in a week. Or in eight weeks. Both are extreme lengths of time to spend on Romeo and Juliet and have serious drawbacks, but on balance the one-week approach far exceeds the eight-week approach.
26. My most fruitful periods of growth as a teacher were those in which I watched lots of other teachers teach. Oddly, watching others taught me how to be myself. It also taught me how to enjoy school and the people I work with (students and teachers).
27. There are too many PD books. Rather than trying to read fifteen books once each, try to read the three most important ones five times each — annotating and discussing and experimenting as you go.
28. The two most important PD books I've read, in terms of how they shaped my career and practice up to this day, are Schmoker's Focus and Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School.
29. The person who learns the most from a PD book is the person who writes it — no one else comes remotely close. But every week I hear from people who take my books and do things with their ideas that I could never have done.
30. Nothing will more quickly make you aware of how foggy and incomplete your thinking is than trying to write an article or a book on what you think you know. I've never felt more incompetent than when I was in the middle of writing These 6 Things and The Will to Learn.
31. Think of the most burnt out teacher you've ever met. Realize that teacher began with the same good intentions you did. Let that teach and humble you.
32. Principals have way more pressure on them than teachers do. Let that make you thankful, that they do it and you don't. Most are doing their best, just like most teachers are.
33. With that said, it's very hard to work with a principal who is not good at their job. When you find yourself in this kind of circumstance, accept that it's hard and then shift your thinking back to what you control.
34. The best teachers tend to have the best lives. Neglect your life outside of school (family, health, friendships) at your peril. I've learned this the hard way.
35. Teaching is a dangerous job for folks with large egos. It's like an alcoholic working at a bar. If you've got ego problems, start working to get to the bottom of those. Today's a good day to start.
36. Teaching is a beautiful job for folks with large egos. If you let it, teaching can be a great right-sizer of the teacher's ego.
37. I'm still trying to figure out how to grow in humility. What I've found so far is that as soon as I think I've understood all that humility is or has to teach me, I've fallen far away from it.
38. Classrooms are the most magical and meaning-laden spaces in the world. Regular classes. Places like yours.
39. Classrooms have as much complexity in them as the universe. (See pp. 27-28 of The Will to Learn for more on this.)
40. Those week nights when you're living your normal and routine life after having worked a normal and routine day at school? That is the real stuff of life. The bulk of your actual life — that's what's happening on those normal days. That's what normal is. Don't miss it.

Well, I did it. Have a good day, colleague.

DSJR