The Worst (and Best) Advice I Ever Got as a Teacher

By Amy White,

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice…

~from Mary Oliver’s “The Journey”

In the teaching profession, there’s a lot that can feel overwhelming for a new teacher, and there’s one thing never in short supply: well-meaning advice. It comes from every direction, and most of it truly means well. The hard part isn’t finding advice. It’s figuring out which pieces are actually worth carrying with you, and which ones you need to set back down.

I got some advice early on that I carried for way too long.

I was a brand-new 6th grade teacher, and someone who cared about me pulled me aside and said: “Don’t smile until after October. Stay stern. Keep your guard up. Those middle school kids will eat you alive if you’re too nice.” I believed them. I wanted to survive my first year, so I did exactly what they said. I held my face in a way that wasn’t mine. I spoke in a voice that seemed to belong to some shadow version of me. I didn’t even recognize her, but I knew I didn’t like her!

And guess what. The kids didn’t like her very much either!

I’ve pondered that outcome a lot, and I don’t think it was ever the smiling or not-smiling that mattered. Maybe it was that I spent those first months being someone else entirely, and kids can tell. They can always tell! I held that tight frown through fall and into winter, and by the time winter came, I’d genuinely forgotten what it felt like to smile in my own classroom, or in a lot of other rooms in my life, for that matter. I think about that stretch of time differently now, mostly because of a teacher I heard about through Leading for Children (LFC). She said almost the same thing I could have said about myself. She used to never smile in the classroom either. But somewhere in the middle of learning with other educators and LFC, something changed. She started smiling more, this time from the inside out, as she began to feel the real weight and reach of her own impact. She let herself be more of who she already was. She trusted that showing up as herself would invite the kids and adults around her to do the same.

That idea has stayed with me. We each carry a voice that’s ours alone, and it deserves the chance to actually be heard, not buried under someone else’s idea of what “the right way” looks like.

The best piece of advice I ever got came later, and it’s stuck with me far longer than the bad advice did: “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” I think that applies to more than just lesson plans and classroom management. It applies to who we let ourselves be while we’re doing this work. Our voice is a powerful tool, and we don’t owe anyone a performance of somebody else’s version of “right.” We know who we are, even when we’ve forgotten how to show it.

Sometimes it just takes a while to hear it again, but it’s always there if we listen.

Mary Oliver describes it best:

…little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own…

When we finally find it again, I hope that voice is smiling. In the classroom, and in as many other rooms of our lives as we can manage.