Thinking About Teaching High School? What You Need to Know Before You Sign the Contract (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781481079440)

My first year of teaching was absolutely the worst year of my life. The only reason I went back for my second was that I had gone to college on a teaching scholarship and unless I completed four years of teaching, I had to pay back a lot of money. Fortunately for me, my second year was a lot better than my first, and by the time I completed the required four years, I could not imagine myself doing anything else.

During the thirty years that I taught high school, I served as mentor to a lot of beginning teachers, both officially and unofficially, and although no two of the teachers I worked with had exactly the same experience, they all felt just as lost and bewildered as I had during my first year.

A couple of years after I retired, a former student asked if I had any "words of wisdom" for her as she began her first year teaching. I don't know how "wise" anything I told her was, but that conversation was the foundation for this book.