When I was training to be a teacher as an undergraduate, my cousin—also a teacher—bought me the book Training Wheels for Teachers: What I Wish I’d Known My First 100 Days on the Job, edited by Randy Howe. It’s a chunky little book filled with “wisdom, tips, and warnings from experienced teachers,” and they all definitely can be helpful, depending upon the situation.

Most of them, however, are pretty self-explanatory, and given that each quote is less than a paragraph long, most of them aren’t explained in detail. It’s sometimes difficult to gain any insight from one quote or another simply due to the brevity of them all. Without context and examples, many pieces of advice seem meaningless.

For example, one quote basically says that kids scrutinize everything about you, even your shoes. That’s it. Now, some of the other quotes in the chapter provide you with other suggestions that back this up, but by itself it really tells us nothing. Yeah, we know kids watch us all the time; any parent could tell you that. So what? What is the context? What is your advice? How do you model for your students?

To be fair, there are some helpful sections that are simply bulleted lists of tips to use, such as how to avoid mistakes when teaching special education students, which offers tips like reviewing each students IEP before distributing grades to ensure all considerations are given before a final decision is reached. Another good tip is to never recommend medication to a parent, since teachers are not doctors. (Although I did have a doctor for a teacher in the fifth grade; she was one of my favorites.)

So many of these tips, however, are just such common sense. Do you really think you would not have known that rules have to be enforced consistently, for example? Before you teach, you get to be a student teacher; I don’t know how many semesters most schools do this for, but in mine it was three—with one of them being a “light” period in which you’re more of a helper than anything else. Before those three, we also get one of observation. So by the time you’re actually teaching on your own (as you often are as a student teacher anyway), you should really either know that already, or not be a teacher, don’t you think? I, myself, would add that you should always include the students when creating the rules, but that’s because I believe in democratic education.

Many other tips are also due to personal preference; for example, one teacher mentions that he or she limits him or herself to three hours to work after school each day. Everyone knows that this is a difficult rule, especially during quarterly report season, and every teacher will have different times needed for grading and preparing for class. English teachers, for example, will usually have the longest time spent reading and checking essays, while teachers with lighter class loads or with multiple choice tests to grade might need less time to spend on such things.

Overall, it’s a fun read for those who are interested in it, though perhaps not the best book for beginning teachers.