A Letter to New Teachers

Peter Gow

Soon the last days and hours of on-boarding programs will transition into opening faculty meetings. For teachers new to the profession or new to their schools, new faces, class lists, weekly schedules, and routines governed by the clock will supersede a summer’s training sessions and poring over handbooks and curriculum guides. This may mean you.

Yes, it will be exhausting and probably not just a little bit scary at the start, but it is a life you choose, and it will get better. Keep open your heart and mind, and it will be exciting, challenging, and rewarding.

There is something else to understand. No matter what grades you will be working with and no matter what sort of students you may have, school is a vast part of their world, too. 

But school is only a part. Students’ backpacks may be full of books and homework, but there is much, much more in there, artifacts of family and community life of which their teachers can only see tiny bits. Students bring to school their experiences, their aspirations, their anxieties, the things about which they feel great and about which they feel bad.

As a teacher, your job is not to ferret out each little piece of every student’s life but rather to understand that those unseen and unknown pieces are there. Above all, teachers must respect the reality that every student lives in their own world as a growing individual. 

Sixty-some years ago I was a country kid traveling an hour and a half each way, every day, to a big-city independent school. In that school I not only had the longest daily commute but was alone as a seventh-grader in having divorced parents and being able to drive a tractor. At that school in those days, there was an ideal, a “[School name] Man,” and we were expected to strive to be that ideal. The sixty-some realities of each of my classmates were subsumed beneath this goal.

It turned out that the realities of my classmates represented a new level of diversity in the school’s history, perhaps not surprising in the late 1960s. A few years later the head of school, in a moment of candor, let on to me that he had been disappointed in my class for resisting conforming to the ideal. I don’t think we were disappointed in ourselves, however.

Schools have learned since those days that institutional and classroom cultures and values must recognize and respect the realities and the worlds of their students. Thank heavens! Great education in 2024 focuses on seeing each student and helping them to become the best and most true versions of who they are and who they can be. Thank heavens for this!

As a new classroom teacher, there are a couple of principles you can use to help your students be their best selves—and to help you be your best teacher self.

First, accept that your students’ individual worlds are their worlds. They live in these worlds and bring the complexities, resources, and challenges of these worlds to school every day. Let your students be themselves and take pleasure in the good aspects of this and learn from—don’t deny!—the more difficult aspects. If you can find ways to acknowledge these worlds in little ways, in banter and in your pedagogy, you will be doing your students and yourself a great big favor—a favor that will pay off in happier and more productive classroom cultures.

Second, accept that you are you and that you occupy your own world. When you walk into your classroom or blow the whistle to start practice or call for lights out in the dormitory, be who you are and don’t try to channel some assumed persona of authority and professionalism. When you were young you could spot a phony, and so can your students. Just be yourself. With time and some mentoring—and very likely some helpful feedback from your very students!—the hard parts will become easier and more natural.

​The field of teaching has a few more sensitive spots in 2024 than it did when I was a new teacher or even when I was in a school supporting new teachers. There is an election coming, and artificial intelligence is once again challenging educators to figure out how to apply a new set of tools wisely; your school will have to provide guidance on such things. Let your own values emerge, positively, in the ways you interact with students, colleagues, and others in your school community. Embrace the positive, add your own positivity, and avoid negativity, which will inevitably pop up because, well, it will. Remember that negativity is usually a manifestation of anxiety, so figure out how to help; this is a big part of teaching.

The most important thing: Have fun! You have been granted the gift of spending a time in a community explicitly devoted to the development of the human spirit, and this will be endlessly interesting and entertaining, even if occasionally vexing. You’re a teacher now, and it’s a pretty great life if you let it be!