How I Survived the First Five Years of Teaching
One Teacher's Journey
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Then it happened. I experienced the first and so far the only fight between students in my classroom.
We were working on how to write paragraphs, so I took my seventh-grade students outside and told them that the theme of their paragraph was nature. They could choose any subject they saw while we were outside, as long as it was about nature. After thirty minutes, we went back into the classroom and I asked for volunteers to share their paragraph. One student stood up and read a wonderful paragraph about ants and how they work together as a family. After she finished reading her paragraph, she sat back down, and the girl who sat behind her told her that her paragraph was stupid.
As if everyone knew what was going to happen next, the mood of the entire class changed. The two girls had been friends, but something had happened between them outside of school, so now they were enemies. The girl who had read her paragraph stood up, the other girl stood up to face her, and neither one of them would back down.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
How I Survived the First Five Years of Teaching is about the struggles an educator faced and how she overcame those struggles in her early days of teaching. The journey begins with the challenges she faced after graduating from college and the difficulties she encountered trying to acquire her first teaching job. It then takes the reader through the different obstacles she confronted each school year. It’s a detailed account about how she endured and overcame student misbehavior and disrespect, a lack of support and cooperation from her principal and assistant principal, disrespect from parents, lack of parental support, lack of student motivation, and her battle with depression.
About the Author
Sylvia A. Wright has been teaching English/language arts and reading for eight years. She received her bachelor’s degree in middle grades education from Fayetteville State University in 2003. She majored in English/language arts and minored in social studies. She began teaching in 2004 at Mayewood Middle School in Sumter, South Carolina. In 2006, she received a master’s degree in divergent learning at Columbia College in Columbia, South Carolina. In addition to teaching at Mayewood, she taught at Tilden Middle School in Rockville, Maryland, and Benton Middle School in Benton, Louisiana. She currently teaches at Cane Bay Middle School in Summerville, South Carolina.