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What Should I Do Now?

I remember my first day as a teacher. I was facing a group of summer school students who needed to pass history to earn promotion to the next grade level. I needed more time to prepare my room, a better grasp on the material I was teaching, and a much stronger sense of the school’s culture. The list of school rules and consequences I had been given by the principal did not indicate who my students would be or how this community functioned. I wanted more time to learn about this new job I was doing. Instead, I had five minutes until my first students would be arriving. I positioned myself at the door with a smile on my face, sweat on my forehead, and a roll book in my hand.

The first few minutes went fairly smoothly. I handed each student a brief “get to know you” questionnaire as they entered the classroom and was pleasantly surprised that most of them began completing it after finding their desk.

That honeymoon period lasted exactly three minutes.

After a brief welcome and introduction, during which I emphasized that each of them could be successful in this class, I began to take roll. When I called the name Curtis, he let me know he was “here.” When I called on Kashay, she told me she was “here” too.

Student number three, Melinda, did not simply announce her presence. Instead of letting me know she was “here,” she told me where I should go.

“What should I do now?”

How should one respond to that? At the time, the best I could come up with was marking her present and moving on. I had not prepared a “toolbox” of strategies for that type of encounter. I could not even mutter the “see me at the end of class” my own teachers had used so often with me.

The confusion and panic I experienced in that moment — and in other What should I do now? moments along the way — have served as powerful motivators as I have studied the craft of teaching. Those moments have posed questions, and those questions have inspired conversations, coursework, reflections and more trial-and-error events. As a result of these experiences, I have learned a little bit more about how to do this amazing job we call teaching. It is my hope that I can always continue to learn from people who have had different experiences and developed different ideas.

When I ask “What should I do now?” let me emphasize from the beginning the proactive element in that question. Although it applies in reactive situations — Melinda just had an outburst; What should I do now? — it also asks us to consider what we should do now, in August, to create that moment we want in November. What should we do now — in this moment — to prevent a problem from happening in May?

I have degrees in history and education and am working toward a third, but as much as I have learned in my own higher education, my real teachers have been my students. They are remarkably adept at telling me what works and what doesn’t. While I was studying my books, many of them were studying the adults at the front of their classrooms. They shared their observations with me during the five years I taught secondary school history and the two years I served as a mentor teacher — a time period long enough to learn a few things others might find valuable, but not so long that I have forgotten the challenges that new teachers face.

It is my hope that you will gain many insights to more effectively approach the question that you, like every teacher, will ask many times: If I want to teach these incredible students effectively, What should I do now?!?

Originally posted August 5, 2005   By Kristi Johnson Smith

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