The effectiveness of your learning environment depends on you. If you create a roomful of distractions, you will probably have a lot of distracted students. However, if you create an atmosphere where learning is expected and rewarded, many students will actually learn in your classroom.

Organization Breeds Confidence

One of the biggest problems for new teachers is dealing with all the paperwork and minutiae of teaching. Many times, new teachers enter the classroom not realizing that they need systems for dealing with late work, tardies, absences, and taking attendance. Without a system of organization in your room, much time will be wasted dealing with mundane, housekeeping issues.

Using the advice given in this book, create your own system of organization for each of these issues. Decide before the first day how you are going to distribute make-up work. Decide what you are going to do about late work. Waiting until a situation arises to deal with it will probably result in lost time and energy, so spend some time up front to get organized, and you will be able to save much time later.

Remember that organizing does not stop with your room and your belongings. You should also have a well-thought-out discipline plan in place and ready to go. Students will try you during the first week of school. If you have a system in place, you will feel more confident as you deal with disruptions and other unexpected situations.

The Value of Education

As you may have noticed, one of the main themes throughout this book is the value of creating high expectations both for yourself and for your students. Of course, your expectations must be based on reality. But they must also be based on the idea that education is important and valuable. Believe it or not, there are teachers who do not see the value in education. Needless to say, students learn very little in their classes.

Education is important for so many reasons. It broadens horizons, making students more willing to be accepting and understanding. It gives students a sense of the past, allowing them to go forward with a basis for making decisions. It teaches students skills that will help them succeed in their lives after school. However, the ultimate goal of education should be to instill a desire to learn. Students should leave school armed with the tools to be able to continue their education on their own.

Realize that there is so much information available that no one can ever “know it all.” In fact, you can expect your students to forget between 50 and 75 percent or more of what they learn in your class as soon as they leave it. This leads some people to argue that teaching individual facts and having students memorize things is a waste of their time and yours.

However, unless an individual knows some basic information, he will appear ignorant. Basic facts are also necessary in the scaffolding of new information. People learn new information and remember it for the long term by connecting it to already existing information in long-term memory. If there is a weakness in a child's educational past, it will become magnified as he progresses through school. It is a false belief that memorization holds no place in education, although, education should be much more than just memorizing lists of terms and concepts.