Why have I built a website to help new teachers?  Good question!  My first reason is that I consider teaching the most important profession in the world.  I began my teaching career in the fall of 1991 at a high school in El Paso, Texas with pure intentions, a love of children in my heart, and a fascination with teaching and learning.  I was so excited to begin my crusade to change the world!

You can probably guess what happened next.  I soon realized that students did not share the same love of learning that I did.  I also realized that I was not prepared to face the obstacles that I was facing.  Not only was I not prepared, I didn’t even know where to turn to get prepared!  I faced uncooperative and disrespectful  students, hostile parents, unsupportive administrators, office politics, a shortage of resources, and a hundred other barriers to my success.  What frustrated me the most was that I couldn’t find a way to figure out how to overcome these barriers.  The teachers at my school operated in isolation, everyone I asked for help gave me vague, general statements like “have high expectations”, and “all children can learn”, or “students don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”  All students can learn…but the ones in my classroom weren’t learning.  I had been successful at every level of my educational career – as a student.  As a teacher, I was a complete washout.  I am not going to lie to you, I spent a few nights grading papers and crying.  Yes, I cried.  You are probably too young to remember the classic movie “Top Gun” with Tom Cruise, but there is a line I’ll always remember from that movie.  Maverick (Cruise) and Goose (Anthony Edwards) get yelled at by their commander for flying their jet too close to the tower after a mission.  The commander tells Maverick and Goose that the next time they pull a stunt like that, he’ll have them court-martialed.  As the two navy pilots exit the office after their butt-chewing, Goose turns to Maverick and says “Mav, do you remember the number for that truck-driving school that we saw on T.V. last night?”  I really felt like I needed the number for the truck-driving school.  I started to believe that I chose the wrong profession.  Had I really wasted five years of college?  What other career was I prepared for?  Was I prepared for ANY profession?  Since I really had no other options, I decided to stick it out.

Let’s fast-forward three years.  I left El Paso and got a job teaching middle school social studies in Houston, Texas.  I slowly began to “figure it out” through trial and error.  Young teachers began coming to me for advice about how to establish their discipline plan, write lesson plans, and present lessons.  A couple more years go by, and the school district I worked for asked me to present my discipline plan to the district’s student teachers.  I finally started to think that I was an effective teacher (by this time I had been teaching eight years).

After eight years of teaching, I get my first administrator position!  I am hired as an Assistant Principal to open a brand-new school a couple of miles down the road from my middle school.  The school is 9^th Grade only (which provides its own set of challenges!)  During my three years there, I am asked to present my discipline workshop to the district’s student teachers AND many of the district’s first-year teachers.  One thing is a constant during all this time:  New teachers at my workshops, new teachers in my building, and teachers that I interview for positions in my building all are saying that they were not prepared to be effective teachers in their first year.

I left Texas in 2002, and became an Assistant Principal at a middle school in southwest Missouri to be near my wife’s family.  New state…same issues with new teachers!  I start kicking around the idea of starting a website to help new teachers.  One reason I procrastinate in building the website…I figure that there are hundreds of websites designed to help new teachers.  I finally do a search on the internet, and you can guess what I found…nothing!  Are you kidding me?  The internet is a gigantic warehouse of knowledge about every subject imaginable, but there are no websites dedicated to helping new teachers survive their first years of teaching?  There’s more information on the internet about Paris Hilton, how to bake banana bread, or which “Twilight” character is the cutest than there is about the most important profession on earth!

That was the last straw!  I began to make a list of the biggest issues facing new teachers, and a list of my solutions to those issues.  I must warn you now…you are going to get my answers in a “no-nonsense” format.  I am not going to sell you a bunch of educational jargon, pie-in-the-sky inspirational drivel, or vague ideas that you may or may not understand or be able to implement.  You will be getting specific instructions and reprintable documents to help you TODAY, not tomorrow or three months from now.

My goal is to make you an effective teacher in less time than it took me to become an effective teacher.  Since it took me about six years, I am confident that I can do that!  There is no reason for you to dread going to work every day, feeling like you aren’t being effective or making a difference.  You are going to be on the “fast track” to effectiveness because you aren’t going to have to spend years making the same mistakes I did.  I am going to tell you the potential mistakes and pitfalls BEFORE you make them, thereby saving you time, work, pain, and suffering.  I am going to take great joy in helping you…it will help me give meaning to those years of helplessness that I suffered through.  I will be drawing on those years of helplessness to assist as many teachers as I can.  Welcome to my club!