Your Teaching Assignment
Before you even begin working at your new school, much of what you will experience during your first year as a teacher has already been decided for you. Administrators make course and teacher assignments over the summer. These decisions determine exactly what grade and classes you will actually teach. Because you are the newest addition to the school, you can expect that you will probably not be given the choicest assignments.
This does not mean that everyone is out to get you or give you the hardest work. However, realize that many teachers feel that they should be given the better assignments because they have worked their way up the seniority ladder. Also, remember that they probably started out teaching the less desirable assignments too.
One reason that new teachers do not always have the best luck with teaching assignments is because veteran teachers often have a say in what they are teaching each year. Many times, administration will ask members of a department to get together and give them a guide to who will be teaching what the following year. In most instances, teachers will continue to teach the same subject each year. However, if someone who has a “choice assignment” leaves or retires, the most senior teacher who wants to change assignments will get her courses. Then, the most senior below this individual can change his assignment, and so on. What this means for you is that those individuals who had the worst teaching assignments will move out of them as soon as they can, leaving them for the newest person on the staff.
Don't expect to come into a school and teach your dream class right away. While you might dream of teaching only third grade or tackling AP American history, you might end up teaching in a different elementary grade or being assigned to courses like regular world history. Even though these assignments may not be what you envisioned, they can provide you with opportunities to learn and grow as a teacher.
One of the problems that many new secondary school teachers face is that they are given all of the leftover courses. For example, a new high school social studies teacher might have the following teaching schedule:
Planning period
Economics
World history
Honors economics
American history
Law studies
Teaching different courses is known as having multiple preps. If you teach five different courses, you have to prepare five sets of lessons each day. Obviously, this is not an easy situation to be in. You may think that a school should realize the obvious — that a new teacher has so many other issues to be concerned about, assigning her to teach five different subjects is just a recipe for disaster. However, the only way a school can remedy the situation is by forcibly moving veteran teachers who have been teaching their courses for a while out of their assignments in order to give the assignment to the new teacher.
Difficult StudentsAs a new teacher, you might be faced with the more difficult students in the school. While this does not happen everywhere, in many schools across the country teachers are able to influence who is and is not placed into their classrooms. Veteran teachers might be able to get a known troublemaker replaced with a better-behaved student. As a result, your classes could have a higher percentage of troublemakers than others.
Approach each class as important. Some teachers treat regular and honors classes differently. However, do not shortchange the students who are earning a regular credit in your course. They need the information and skills that you will teach them as much as — if not more than — students in honors classes.
If you find that you have a large number of very difficult students in your classroom, do not be afraid to discuss this with your mentor and possibly your administrator. Sometimes administrators will separate students who have a hard time working with each other by removing one from your class. This may be enough to alleviate the situation and make your teaching experience much easier.
