The Survey Says
Seniority is a great thing. Remember your first year of teaching? Would you like to repeat that again?
How do you know you’ve been teaching a long time? Besides the fact that you’re probably making hundreds of thousand dollars a year, there are other factors.
ESGI and ThinkFives polled hundreds of teachers and found these Top 5 ways you know you’ve been teaching for a long time.
Your Former Students Aren’t Students Anymore
Many teachers cite the fact that you’ve been teaching for a long time when you start teaching the brothers, sisters and especially children of former students. One teacher even cited teaching the third generation of a family.
You Know You’ve Been Teaching a Long Time When:
- “You are teaching former students’ kids.”
- “A former student becomes a colleague.”
- “Students call you grandma, instead of mom.”
- “Your students guess your age as 80.”
- “You begin to teach the third generation!!”
School is Part of Your Life
You know you’ve been teaching for a long time when school becomes a part of your life. You live it, you breathe it and people tell you that’s all you talk about. Have you ever heard of the comment from friends that when teachers get together, all they talk about is teaching?
You Know You’ve Been Teaching a Long Time When:
- “Your friends and family have to remind you that you’re not in school and you have to turn off your ‘teacher voice.’”
- “I need a U-Haul to move classrooms!”
- “You dream about correcting papers.”
- “You tell your husband to ‘freeze’ when you are having an argument!😃”
- “Your bladder is trained to pee twice a day for nine months of the year.”
Nothing Phases You Anymore
Many teachers shared the comment that nothing phases you anymore when you’re a veteran teacher. That includes principals, colleagues, parents, and students.
You Know You’ve Been Teaching a Long Time When:
- “A big wrench in the plans doesn’t give you anxiety.”
- “A crazy story does not phase you!”
- “Boogers do not bother you.”
- “You can just keep rolling along when the world around you is blowing up.”
- “There isn’t anything you haven’t heard come out of a student’s mouth.”
Your Teaching Tools Have Cobwebs
If you are like some of us here at ThinkFives, when we took a methodology class, we learned how to use a projector, a ditto machine, an overhead, and an opaque projector.
All these newfangled things have hit the classroom in the last decade and probably have replaced the things we loved.
You Know You’ve Been Teaching a Long Time When:
- “You remember having ditto ink all over your hands and clothes.”
- “You have used a transparency projector.”
- “You remember chalkboards as being the big deal!”
- “You still have record albums of kids music!😳”
- “You remember the excitement of one computer and a projector.”
You Are A Master Teacher Now
One positive aspect of being an experienced teacher is that you’ve now mastered just about everything. You keep your cool. What is new is old. And you can multitask with the best of them.
You Know You’ve Been Teaching a Long Time When:
- “You can continue to teach a lesson while putting on a child’s bandaid and stare down a non-compliant individual.”
- “The ‘new’ way of teaching things is actually the ‘old way.’ Everything comes full circle.”
- “You no longer care if you look silly dancing and singing with your kids.”
- “You quote old movies that your kindergartners don’t know anymore.”
- “Younger mentor teachers tell you about this great program, ESGI, and offer to train you. I brought this program to the district 10+ years ago!”
Are there other ways you know you’ve been teaching a long time?
You know you have been teaching a long time when your Kindergarten students cash you out at the register or take your dinner order!
You know you have been teaching a long time when you take your class on a field trip and when you get on the bus, the driver is a former KINDERGARTEN student! And then a couple of years later, his daughter is in your class!
You know you have been teaching a long time when you can probably identify the class clowns and the smarties from the bunch on Day 1.
Great insights!