1. On the first day, you deal with excitement and nervousness by just smiling a lot.
2. You don't eat lunch or use the bathroom during the school day.
3. You suddenly carry multiple bags everywhere.
4. Your friends and family complain that you've started to talk to them as if they are children.
5. You get excited for your weekends because you can have more time to plan lessons.
6. Or you think you are good enough to wing it in class.
7. You start picking up on adolescent slang.
8. Your refer to your students as "your kids."
9. You make the mistake of speaking to students as if they are rational adults.
10. You start to think your students understand you better than adults.
11. You spend way too much time making visual anchors.
12. You eat all the school snacks.
13. You take everything your students do and say personally.
14. You say to yourself, "I'm never having kids."
15. Some nights you cry yourself to sleep.
16. You think about quitting everyday.
17. You believe everything your principal says.
18. When you are being observed you automatically become a less effective teacher.
19. You have more pictures of your students in your phone than of your family.
20. You Snapchat your students' antics and they have no idea.
21. Your top calls on your cell phone is a list of parents.
22. You countdown to the next holiday break.
23. You have taken pictures of student work and sent it to all your friends.
24. You think because you are young that your students will think you are cool.
25. You try to be your students' friend.
26. You've made the mistake of actually eating students' homemade baked goods.
27. A student corrects you and you shut him down.
28. You think students are supposed to listen to you because you are an adult.
29. You've lost complete control of the class and for several moments just stood there, silent.
30. You yell a lot and feel bad about it but then yell some more.
31. You go out on Thursday night with your college friends and on Friday you tell your students it's a movie day and you beg for silence.
32. On the last day of the school year of your first year of teaching you feel like this:
33. When someone asks you about your first year of teaching you say something like, "You couldn't pay me to be a first-year teacher again."
But you can't deny what you learned in your first year made you a better teacher!
