Failure to retain
May 11, 2006 am31 10:31 am
My cousin, 2nd year teacher, elementary. Doing a great job, according to all (according to her, and rings true). Having health problems from the stress (exhaustion might be closer to the correct word, though she said "stress").
Every day's planning was a feat of strength to produce. Everything from scratch. No help. No canned lessons to use as a starting point. And her first year lessons? Those were for a different grade.
No help from her principal, who limited her suggestion from her only observation to something equivalent to "your window is open too wide."
None from colleagues, I don't think.
She was working at burn-out pace, and the world just watched silently.
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JD2718 
I’ve gotten those observations. Once, I got one that neither I nor my colleagues, English teachers on and all, could comprehend. The group’s verdict?
“If he didn’t like it, you’d know.”
I’m sorry to see they haven’t learned to treat your cousin any better over the last twenty years.
Nah. She’s taking next year off, fingers crossed that she will come back the following September.
I vowed after my second year, when I realized that I was not going to quit, that I would never forget how awful my first year was, and that I would do everything I could to help new teachers not go through what I had.
I still remember what it feels like to wake up at 10PM, on the couch, shoes on, having collapsed asleep at 5.
I still remember not knowing how to do anything, and not knowing who to ask.
I still remember panicking at 4AM with no lessons written.
I still remember the rage I felt after almost a year when I learned that my colleagues had lessons that no one had offered to share with the eight new teachers in my department (