First Year teaching in Texas in the late 70s.

Lately, I've been following a teachers' help line FB page, and it's so encouraging sometimes, and then other times so sad. Classroom management is very hard to learn through practice or student teaching, so most classroom teachers have a baptism by fire as we used to say. Live and learn or crash and burn.  Sadly most new teachers rarely last 2 years, the last time I researched the topic.

I only lasted 4 because I was older than most 1st year teachers because I'd substituted and gone to graduate school for a semester. Substituting helps you see which schools have good administrators, office staff, teachers, and other strengths. To be a substitute, you usually don't have to be certified to teach in TX (although I was). I definitely was not certified to teach every subject to every grade level 6th-12th.

I'd been an English major and loved literature. But because I was certified in secondary education, I hadn't learned how to teach reading at all.  Of course my first assignment was teaching life skills reading to 9th graders who were reading at  a remedial (anywhere from 3rd to  8th grade).  This through me for a loop.

By the third week of school, I'd learned that we would be doing a lot of reading exercises where they used reference materials like a phone book or an encyclopedia. Of course there was a leveled SRA resource curriculum that was supposed to help, but it was pretty dated. By the end of the 3rd week, I though I might survive the semester. Then on Friday, I got word that due to enrollment changes, I would be starting at middle school on the opposite side of the metroplex.

That's when the real adventure began.