Elementary School Teacher Career Information

Video Transcript

"What do you think reluctant might mean? What do you think, Jamie? What does it look like Tiffany's doing? One of the things I would tell any person who wanted to go into the field is that early on you need to think a lot about classroom management. And I'm not saying less about curriculum, but a lot about classroom management. If you can get their attention, you can teach them anything. That would be the advice that I would give them. And you get good classroom management skills from watching teachers who have good classroom management skills, and assessing what they're doing. That's the best way to go about it. And I don't know a good teacher out there who wouldn't let you do that, and encourage you with all the help that you could need. You should be the best friend of the worst students. The student with the worst behavior in your class. You should be the best friend of their parent, if you can achieve that, because it will make everyone's life a lot easier. If you can create a triangle of responsibility between the teacher and the parent and the student, you'll be successful throughout. And don't take problems to the principal until the principal needs to be handling the problem. And the principal will give you a lot more leeway and respect. Mostly if you treat a student with respect you're going to get respect back from them. I was working a full time job when I was trying to become--trying to do this as well. So, I guess the biggest challenge was just time management during that time period. But, if you go through the program and you fulfill the obligations of the programs, I don't see that there should be major challenges to becoming one."