Foreword

Developing online resources for beginning teachers is not easy. What new teachers need most of all is a mentor — an experienced, thoughtful, successful teacher who can take the time to guide them through their first year. They need someone to steer them clear of potential disasters and remind them that what seems like a disaster now is not the end of the world, someone to answer questions and give them timely advice, and, sometimes, simply a shoulder to cry on. Unfortunately, not every first-year teacher can have a wonderful mentor.

The First Year was conceived as the next best thing — the closest a web resource can come to the face-to-face support a real, live, caring mentor can provide. The essays in this collection were written as a weblog over the span of the 2005–2006 academic year. The author, Kristi Johnson Smith, intended them to be read soon after she wrote them, and so you’ll notice that most of her stories and much of her advice pertains to specific times of the year. (The original publication date appears at the top of each page.) Kristi maintained email correspondence with some of her readers, and some of the essays answer their specific questions. All of them, though, discuss solutions to problems that teachers face every day.

Kristi writes with a warm, personal tone about her own experiences as a first-year teacher and what she learned from them. You’ll find that although she is an excellent teacher now, she was far from excellent then! She talks frankly about the mistakes she made — but, more importantly, about what she learned from them, and about how she used her mistakes to become a better teacher.

What we hope you’ll take away from The First Year is, first of all, the knowledge that you are not alone. You are part of a community of educators that stretches beyond your classroom, school, and school system. Even if we can’t see you — even if we don’t necessarily even know who you are! — we appreciate what you do, and we care about you. We want you to succeed, not just in terms of curricula and competencies and test scores, but personally.

Second, we want you to know that teaching is hard — and that’s o.k. Everything worth doing is hard. You will make mistakes in your first year, and you will wish that your life had a “rewind” button. But you will learn from those mistakes, and you’ll use them to become a better teacher and a better person.

We hope that The First Year will help you avoid some mistakes, learn from others, and know that you are appreciated. If we can’t give you the comfort and aid of a face-to-face mentor, we think that Kristi’s voice in these essays is the closest anyone can come on the web. And please, let us know what else we can do to support you and how we can improve these resources. Our support for new teachers is continually evolving, and we rely on feedback from teachers to improve.

All of us at LEARN NC wish you the best of luck as you embark on your teaching career.

David Walbert
Editorial Director, LEARN NC
June, 2006