Letter to New Teachers: You Are Students, Too, And Just Accept This—You’ll Be Glad You Did
Peter GowAugust 2025If you are new to the teaching profession, the school year is upon you; it may already have started, depending on your location. I hope that you have, or have had, a great orientation program and that you have been handed at least one or two of some the very fine and wise articles in the education press directed at people in your situation. Teachers have been at this work for centuries, and we and the schools where we have been working have learned a thing or two.
I am on the far side of where you are right now, long(ish) gone from the classroom and hallways and athletic fields and auditoriums. But as the years go on I keep discovering something about teaching that I wish I had fully understood fifty years ago: every time a new email or text or call or social media message pops up, I realize that I very likely learned more important lessons from my students than they ever learned from me. Because teaching, done right and embraced as more than the transmission of facts and procedures, is a lifetime contract between you and your students.
Think about it: How many of your old teachers can you visualize and hear in your head? How many anecdotes or even quotations from your old teachers can you remember? How many times have you almost, kinda, sorta wished you could talk to one or two (or more) of them this very day?
Your old teachers are still learning, as you will be soon or maybe already are, that effective teaching is about relationships. It’s about getting to know and to understand and above all to believe in your students—just as it mattered to you when a teacher believed in YOU.
Since I had the privilege of working in independent schools where my classes were small and in which I was put into multiple roles in students’ lives, I came to know many of them very well—just as they were getting to know me well. And so the very best and most meaningful of those emails and texts and calls and posts come from old students. Whether they graduated ten or twenty or forty years ago, they know that we had a relationship that they can expect to have lasted until 2025. Sometimes, rarely, I am asked for advice and perspective, but most other times it’s just a time to catch up.
I didn’t set out to have these lifelong friendships become a feature of my career, though I suppose I could have considered the long afternoons my father spent sitting on his screen porch chatting with old students who had come back to visit their old school and their old teacher. (He happens to have spent his career in a small boarding school with a very specialized mission, and in retirement he continued to live right next to the campus.) Or the sad day when I shook hands with scores of them at his memorial service.
For some years I was the impresario of programming for new teachers at the school where I passed the bulk of my career, and we worked like crazy to do it right—to touch all the bases and to provide resources that would make the transition into a new school (for all) and a new career (for many) as seamless as possible. I tried to draw upon my own experiences as a new teacher and to fold in the feedback we received from previous cohort members. What I came to understand is that, come the middle of September, the even best organized and most comprehensive programs will feel to participants paradoxically as too much, too soon and too little, too late.
What I realize now is that all the technical and procedural advice we offered our new folks was valuable and important, and I wouldn’t change that. But I would have us focus even more—and I would have YOU focus, New Teacher—on the principle that students come first and to cherish and nurture the relationships you are building them, in whatever your role—as teacher, coach, advisor, dormitory supervisor, or something else. Get to know them, to empathize with what THEY are feeling and going through, and above all believe in them as human beings who are worthy, whether they have done their homework or not, of your full attention and respect. Know that your students have at least as many things to teach you about the human experience and the human spirit as you have to teach them about your particular subject area or about the effective tactics in the sport you may coach.
Be open to your students’ lessons for you, and you will be building a life that has more good things in it than you might ever have imagined. You will be able to thank your students for some of that!
