Mike Kelley

You've got questions. We've got answers, and sometimes we answer twice (listen to this episode to see what I mean). In this email roundup, we help you calm your nerves as you prepare for the first day of school. We also discuss some grittier subjects, including one emailer's frustrations in his student teaching experience and another teacher's trouble dealing with a student that loves to play the victim in class.

Our last few shows have been dedicated to interviews, so we decided to knock out some of the listener email that's been piling up in the interim. Today we hit some of the basics of Teaching 101, like how to write lesson plans. Join us as we broadcast from Glen's sprawling estate (specifically his living room). Here, I'll even pull up an extra chair for you.

We're back from summer vacation! In this episode, we talk to Candy Shively of www.teachersfirst.com. Every few weeks, she's going to stop by to present free web resources you can use to integrate technology into your classroom, no matter how much you know or don't know about computers. We're back on our regular production schedule, so look for another episode in two weeks!

If you thought last week's discussion on parent phone calls ended abruptly, you weren't imagining things. We got a bit long-winded and decided to split the conversation into two parts. This episode features the conclusion of our discussion. What sorts of things should you consider before you make a call home? How is a parent phone conference like a warranty claim on a faulty T.V.? These and other questions are asked and answered. Listener email comes from a new teacher whose employment started midway through the school year. How does she connect with a community that doesn't even know she's there?

If you don’t know how to conduct a successful phone conference with parents, you’ll end up dreading the time you spend on the phone almost as much as the lunches the cafeteria serves on “Not Quite Fish Patty” Fridays. In this episode, we start with the easy stuff: making positive phone calls home when students exceed your expectations. Then we move on to the less pleasant phone calls you’ll need to make. You know the ones I’m talking about, the “Your kid is driving me to an early grave” calls? Good times. Speaking of good times, our listener email is from someone who’s not having them. (Talk about an awkward segue.) He wants to know what to do if you slip up and accidentally curse in front of your students. Not just any curse word, mind you, but the Big One, the word that shares the same first letter as the word “fired.”

All new teachers face similar challenges, the first of which is to actually find a teaching job. You’ve spent years of your life preparing for your professional career, so how are you supposed to cram all of that into a 15-minute job interview? Glen is a recruiter for his school district, and he discusses interviewing strategies that will make you stand out above the throngs of other candidates and land a job. One listener’s private school is about to be audited by the state, and she needs to know how she can prove her instruction aligns with state standards. We’ll show that the terms “audit” and “panic attack” need not be synonymous.

In this episode, we talk about squelching ring leaders, kids that encourage bad behavior by modeling it day in and day out. Our listener mail comes from a college student about to start student teaching. She wants to know what it means "not to smile before December." Can she avoid the frowniest Thanksgiving ever? What does that even mean?

Ever wondered how a principal's opinion of you changes when you send kids to the office? Are you worried that, by referring students, you're announcing to the entire school "I can't control my class"? Wonder and worry no more, as we talk about the role administrators will play in your classroom management strategies. We also answer an email from a teacher who thinks she made a lousy impression on parents during Back To School Night, and worries that (because she's so young) she'll never regain parents' respect.

In our premiere episode, the hosts introduce themselves and discuss the format of the show. Each show begins with a Warm-Up, a topic that’s on our minds. This week’s Warm-Up is an overview of classroom management. The second half of the show is listener email, where we delve into the questions you send us here at the Hotline. It sounds like things are going very poorly for a teacher who started mid-year. Her kids are out of control and she’s knee deep in problems. We do our best to help out.