Last year was my first year teaching, and honestly what I found most helpful was all of the hours I was forced to observe other teachers for my MED. I observed about 40 hours with a fantastic teacher and learned a ton. The other 60 hours I observed a mixture of decent, beginner, and solid teachers and was able to see what worked and didn't work in their classes.

I would just try to pick other teachers brains at your school for help. Don't be afraid to ask them for ideas or strategies. All teachers have been there before, so we are usually willing to help each other out. Are their going to be other teachers at your school teaching the same subject? And are you going to have a mentor teacher there? Either will make it easier to ease yourself in.

As far as resources online go, I didn't really have any go to ones for starting the year, I would use the internet to search for activities and worksheets for individual lessons a bunch during the year though.

The big thing to start is just to concentrate on setting up good classroom management (and don't worry if yours is not great to start, nobody does) and procedures to start off with. Have a few simple rules that you install at the beginning from the first day, and come with a good attention getter procedure for when you are getting class attention (whether it's a countdown 3,2,1 or something else). If you have a Harry Wong book (the first days of school one the poster mentioned above me is good) he has many good strategies for this, though they can be tough to implement.

Mainly I'd just say to make sure you don't let things get to you too much if they are negative. You are going to have a certain number of students that just don't care and you'll never reach, concentrate on doing everything you can and celebrate the small victories. If you make a personal connection with students you can turn around students that you would never think you would get and surprise yourself.

I think the hardest thing as a teacher is you have to care but you can't let yourself care too much. If you care too much you'll burn out and be out of the profession, but you have to care enough to be a good teacher.

This post was edited on 7/14/14 at 10:35 pm