UPDATE: Voting is closed!  Check below to see which entry won the prize! 

A few weeks ago, we posted an article called "What New Teachers Should Know" and challenged our readers to submit their own advice for teachers new to the profession.  We received several excellent submissions, all included in this article. 

At the end of the advice below, you'll see a survey to vote for the best entry. No ballot stuffing -- ONE vote per person per day.  The winner will receive a $20 Amazon gift card!  Share this advice with teachers, particularly new and young teachers, and ask everyone you know to read and vote!

Entry #1 by Ryan Rondorf

Be proactive with establishing positive parent relationships! Build a healthy and consistent method of communication with families that creates a mutually beneficial partnership for student success.

(Don’t wait until the first bad grade or disciplinary issue!!!)

Entry #2 by Cassie Piggott

The best advice I know to give is that everyone sucks during their first year of teaching. Your mentor, your principal, the snooty teacher down the hall, they all were terrible teachers at one point in time. Be kind to yourself and realize there is a learning curve to teaching. Also, don’t try to adopt a style of teaching that doesn’t work for you!

Entry #3 by Amy Voigt

The first year is like nothing else; parents think you are roadkill, some kids will take advantage, and in most states, new teachers are not protected by tenure (here in MI we are a “right to work” state). That said, kids are amazing! They love new energy and enthusiasm. New teachers need mentors who want them to succeed and not who see them as competition (that happens). Advice? Try new things, but also do what your colleagues do. Think ( but not too much). Keep records- when you call parents, when they do or don’t respond, and when/if you need administrators help. JOIN THE UNION. Take time for yourself- go to the gym and the doctor when you need. Remember, while teaching is a calling, it’s also work....At least one weekend day is for FUN. And thanks, thanks so much, for wanting to teach. We older kids need you to take up the torch, to teach our grandchildren, and to continue to do the greatest job around: to build the future.

Entry #4 by Heather Brown 

Be ready to admit to your students that you don't know the answers to every question. Look up what you didn't know, and report back to them with both the answer and where/how you found it. Model lifelong learning.

PRIZE WINNER ~~ Entry #5 by Kristin Grandfield Schimanski ~~ PRIZE WINNER

I always tell them that it doesn't always get easier but it gets better. The work and time we spend pays off in ways we didn't or couldn't imagine. Being a veteran doesn't mean we've figured it out because we change, kids change, schools change. Ride the wave of change and know that if you truly love teaching and love being with the kids, then we've got the best gig around.

Entry #6 by Janet Long 

The most important part of teaching in high school is building relationships and taking care of people.  Be yourself and find things you have in common with the kiddos.  Treat them like human beings with feelings.  They aren't just numbers. When students behave in ways you don't like or don't understand, don't assume they're bad or stupid.  Assume they're smart and that their behavior makes sense from their perspectives.  You need to convince them that what they want is very similar to what you want.  Also, make time for yourself.  Don't let planning and grading ruin your twenties.  Go out and have fun.  If you aren't happy, you won't be the best teacher you can be. 

By Jim Dunning
[WARNING: The perspective I present here is not carved in the granite of my brain — this is what we in the high school debate world (as opposed to the presidential debate world) call a Constructive, meant to prompt responses intended to transform my opinion. That means “Write back! This is a dialogue.”]

Not too long ago, one of my students told me her life’s aspiration is to fix what my generation did to the world. I asked what she believed needed fixing: “You know, the environment, poverty, poor health care, hunger, crime-especially-gun-violence, discrimination, and inequality. All the stuff you created.” I asked how that all was my generation’s doing, and she said because we have made it worse. Admirably, unlike us Baby Boomers, she wants to leave the world better than she found it.
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There’s irony in that I probably have to explain my meaning of “generation gap” to the demographic that substantiates the current reality — a fitting punishment for incipient senescence. Google Ngram neatly marks the term’s entry into the world and paints its decline to today’s virtual obscurity.

​Although the term was born just a handful of years after my birth, the concept has been around since the idea of “teenager” has been around. That is, ever since adolescents transcended from being primarily a resource to a marketing demographic. I chuckle—wearily now—when I hear my contemporaries complain/lament/rail/bitch about the moral decline of today’s youth because they don’t seem to ever consider how much they sound like their parents.

Of course, this creates the Generation Gap, with opposing sides pointing fingers, invective, and sometimes guns at each other.

For me, it was parents complaining about my generation’s music, politics, entitlement, sense of entitlement, clothes, sexuality and sex, drugs and sex, etc. Our complaints back at them were about the environment, discrimination, inequality, poverty, violence, politics, and hunger — all pretty much summarized with “Never trust anyone over 30!” and a determination to leave the world better than we found it.

In fact, this Generational Gap finger-pointing has been going on for centuries.

​Based on my own experience (and past belief system(s)), I can understand why my student blames me for her pessimistic perception of the world—after all, I did that once. My generation’s short-term memory is unsurprising since it’s so pervasive, but still frustrating; I almost think, given the thousands of years of its history, that criticism of the next generation must serve some evolutionary biological purpose; what it is, I haven’t figured out.

Thus, I am not shocked at my student’s assessment and goals.

But I am bewildered — primarily because of the enormous amount of historical and contemporary information available to Millennials in the form of entertainment, news, and scholarly works. A Millennial's “Thoughts from a hipster coffee shop…” recently served up this indictment of her peers--

This brings me to my question for the Far Side of the Generation Gap. Not only do we have—literally—at our fingertips the greatest trove of information ever available to any human, but, as we look out the Starbuck’s window, what is it that we see that makes so many of us fervently believe the world is worse off than it was yesterday or last week or last year or 30 or 50 years ago?

​Do we live in the “most privileged time” ever?

Not to say that the world is perfect (it definitely is not), but, personally, I can easily recall that my family never got strawberries in December in snowy Western New York when I was a kid — metonymic for access to food and every type of consumer good imaginable is unimaginably greater today than it was 50 years ago in this country. Grocery stores looked nothing like what most Americans experience now. In fact, not only does just about everything that was around when I was in high school cost less in dollars, but significantly less in the number of labor hours required to purchase it. And that leaves out all the stuff that wasn’t even thought of then but is quotidian now.

Yes, there are social and economic and personal injustices—still!— but today’s “Marches” were bloody riots when I was a kid. During my sophomore year in high school, on average, a bomb went off somewhere in the United States every day! There were armed soldiers on college campuses. My mom had to have my dad’s permission to have her bank issue her a credit card. When I was seven, my dad couldn’t get to his store for a week because race riots had burned out swaths of the city.

That stash of information in everyone’s pocket seems to back up my anecdotal evidence. Data shows that income and wealth for everyone has done nothing but increase in the past half-century--

​​—not only in this country, but the world…

Why?

The current narrative for Millenials is that they are unable to start families and buy houses and big-ticket consumer goods — all because they believe they are the first generation to not do as well as their parents. They all walk around with $1,000 mega-computer-communicators in their pockets, but think the world is devolving into chaos and disaster. Is it really?

What does the world look like on your side of the Gap? Comment below!
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Also check out TED Talks by Hans Rosling and Matt Ridley.