How One Novice Teacher Persevered Through A Challenging First Year

When Martha Jones, a 2017-18 Rutgers Alternate Route candidate, found that she was struggling in her first year of teaching, it was easy to get discouraged. “It was a disaster for me,” remembers Martha. “I was not prepared to manage a classroom. I knew there would be issues, but I did not know how to handle the students. It got off on the wrong foot and I never really got [control of the classroom] back.” However, because of Martha's resourceful nature and the unique way the Rutgers Alternate Route program is positioned, Martha was able to recover from this experience and create a path for her teaching career that took her to a job that she loves.

A Challenging First Year

Like many other Alternate Route candidates, teaching was a career change for Martha. Martha worked in business for many years, reaching the level of general manager of an advertising firm. After that, she was a stay-at-home mom for 10 years with a child who has mild special needs. In her spare time, Martha volunteered at Covenant House New Jersey, offering financial advice to the young people there. Through that work, Martha met a woman who was working towards her Associate’s degree, but who desperately needed math tutoring. Martha was able to help her successfully pass the math classes and found the experience incredibly rewarding, encouraging Martha to consider teaching as a second career, which she ultimately decided to pursue. 

Martha enrolled in the Rutgers Alternate Route program in 2017 and was hired as a 7th-grade teacher at a charter school in Newark, where she faced the challenges of her first year. Martha didn’t give up, though, and continued working hard to prepare lessons and reach her students. “I worked all the time. I would spend 2-4 hours for each lesson plan. The administration at the school put a lot of effort into helping, but wasn’t able to help with what I needed.” At the end of the school year, Martha was let go by the school leader, which wasn’t a big shock to her, but left her scarred. “That year had been so difficult and draining for me, and I never really felt like I succeeded,” according to Martha. “I thought I wasn’t ready to be a teacher.”

Volunteering as Learning and Healing

Feeling comfortable to share the situation with her Rutgers Alternate Route instructors, Martha expressed her challenges of that first year. She decided to take her education and career into her own hands and collaboratively arranged a customized teaching residency for herself at a Discovery Charter School in Newark, the school that her instructors operated and the location of her teacher training classes. During the 2018-19 school year, Martha volunteered at the school, learning the ropes as a co-teacher for a year. “I needed a situation where I can watch someone who teaches math to learn how to do it,” says Martha. “I had such a good experience with Alternate Route courses at Discovery Charter School. I had fantastic teachers to learn from and I was able to volunteer there, too.”

Working alongside her mentor Mohammed Kabbani, a Rutgers Alternate Route alum and course instructor, Martha observed how a seasoned teacher had learned to manage a classroom over many years. “I had a phenomenal mentor. He was able to give me exactly what I needed. He would demonstrate something for me for 5 minutes and I would think ‘oooooh’ and I would copy what he did. It really worked for me.”

From there, the school’s head of curriculum offered to bring Martha on part-time helping with a science class. “Having it be part-time, I was able to heal. The feelings from my bad year slowly washed away and I had these great mentors to work with.”

Lessons from the Field

From this experience, Martha took away several lessons that she’d want to pass along to other teachers at the start of their career:

1. When it’s time to end class, you end class. “One of my biggest classroom management issues was that we didn’t always get through the lesson plan and I would get really stressed out about that. What I learned at Discovery is that when it’s time to end class, you end class. If there isn’t time to finish a lesson, it will have to happen the next day – it doesn’t help for me to stress myself about it. In general, I learned not to be so hard on myself as a teacher. You do your best and if something doesn’t go as planned, you learn from it and move on. That attitude helped relieve a lot of anxiety for me.” 

2. If the first year doesn’t work out, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad teacher. “There were a couple of reasons I had a bad first year. Yes it’s a really hard job to stay on top of and that’s true for everyone in the Alternate Route program. It just might be the wrong school for you. I don’t think it would work out for me at the school where I was even if I went in as the teacher I am now. It wasn’t a good fit. I know for a lot of teachers, if they don’t get asked back it might be really devastating, but it doesn’t need to be. There are jobs out there and if you feel like being a teacher is for you, you can find another teaching job that’s a better fit.”

3. Every student wants to learn. “I would have these moments with difficult students where I would think that they didn’t want to learn. My mentor told me ‘Every student wants to learn.’ That completely switched my mindset to thinking ‘What does this child need from me?’ I began to understand that sometimes there are things that are more important than the lesson plan. If learning is happening, learning is happening and that’s what’s important.”

Finding the Right Fit

This past September, Martha stepped back into the role of teacher of record in a new position at Primary Prep in Jersey City teaching math for grades 5-8.  “This year’s going well and it feels fun and I feel like I’m in the right profession,” reports Martha. “The stuff that bothers people and makes them leave teaching, I have a different perspective on. I don’t get bent out of shape anymore like I can’t deal with small stuff. There’s enough good that I can deal with anything else.” 

If you’re interested in changing careers like Martha and would like to become a confident, enriched teacher, visit the Rutgers Alternate Route website to learn more about the program. To keep up with more encouraging stories like this, be sure to follow Rutgers Alternate Route on Twitter for more information and stories from the education field.