Reddit reviews Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56

Not to diminish your concerns (knowing someone's name IS important), but there are, like, 24 other things that you should be deathly afraid of. But soldier on! You can do it! I recommend The First Days of School by the Wongs and Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire.

And you remember kids' names like anything else-- use mnemonic tricks. Learn at least one thing about each student that you can identify with his or her face (and name). Also name cards, seating chart, get-to-know-you games, etc. Say their names as often as possible until you learn them.

Good luck!

Rafe Esquith's Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire. It's amazing how his experiences teaching 5th graders relate to so many of my own teaching college students. This won't offer a lot of insight into the specifics of college classroom management or course design, but it will inspire you to make this a profession you love -- it least, it has done so for me. Best of luck!

https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Like-Your-Hairs-Fire/dp/0143112864

I highly recommend "Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire" for your reading pleasure!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0143112864

Teaching is definitely fun, because you can see real results. A lot of my students last year could not correctly answer the "gotcha" style questions on the state standardized test, but every one, and I guarantee this, every one of them can tell you, given the choice of four poets, the correct writer of any poem by Dickinson, Frost, Whitman, or Shakespeare - based on the style alone. For final projects, we did things like "rewrite a Frost poem in the style of Whitman." Is it on the state test? No. But the unit covered a lot of things that were, and most importantly, it got them excited about learning and literature. In the middle grades, I think drilling the test questions just fosters a sense of apathy. ("Staying low on Bloom's" as you might call it in your classes!)

I think the most jarring aspect of education is realizing that you cannot ever be the teacher you envisioned when you were in high-school or college. Everything I had planned to do as a "pre-teacher" would eventually (1) hurt my classroom management, (2) cater towards only one or two learning styles, or (3) end up being more "fun" than educational. It sucks, but in order to be a truly effective teacher, you have to look at what have been empirically proven to be good teaching techniques, even if they're something you hated doing as a student. You have to make new role models for yourself, like this guy, or this guy, and practice what they teach - even if it means working as many hours as they do (over 60).

If you are interested in educational policy, you should definitely give this book a gander. It basically takes every educational debate in the country, explains both sides, and gives examples of laws/precedents/statistics to support each side. Great stuff. In order to get my master's degree, I had to write an actual district/state/federal law and try to get it on the ballot. I used that book to make sure my case was air-tight!

Keep up the good work, the enthusiasm you're showing now is what makes great teachers. Many teachers get into the job because their parents did it, or because they thought education would be an easier major than math. Idealism leads to innovation.

My wife teaches that age range and loved this book: Teach Like Your Hair Is On Fire by Rafe Esquith.