making mistakes

Glen's on vacation this week, but the show must go on! Big things are happening at the New Teacher Hotline even though it's only our tenth episode. We unveil a new segment this week called the American Top Fifty, with a goal of interviewing the Teachers of the Year from all 50 states. After all, what could be better than teaching tips and advice from the best of the best? This week Mike talks to Dana Boyd, the Teacher of the Year from Texas. The honoree from deep in the heart of Texas has a big heart herself and lots of good advice about truly valuing your students.

This week features the premiere of a new segment called The Fatal Five! (Arooooooo!) We talk about five fatal mistakes a new teacher can make that can make the school year very unpleasant. Our listener email this week comes from Jamie, who wants an overview of lesson planning. She’s used to tutoring, where the lesson plan is “Do these questions and I’ll explain them to you,” but she figures there’s more to it than that with formal classroom instruction. BIG NEWS: The New Teacher Hotline has something new and exciting up its electronic sleeves! It all starts with our next show, the glorious 10th episode extravaganza. We’re taking an extra week to get it ready, and it will soar like an eagle right into your ear canal (ouch) on July 4, 2007.

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.”