Here is a nice little montage of my first set of students from Cram Middle School. It was my first year of teaching in the 2014-2015 school year, and I learned a lot of hard lessons that year.
Lesson 1 of course being: Don’t be nice. It hardly ever works in your favor as a teacher to be nice. I think a nice veteran teacher told me a few months in “You have to scare them a little.” And so, it took me yet another year, but I would eventually instill some fear in children for my rest of the days in education.
Teaching is a lot like acting, and I’ve developed an adequate persona of sarcasm and cynicism to deal with the trauama of teaching middle school. It wouldn’t work for everyone, but for some reason it certainly works better than being nice and kind.
