I retired from teaching this year (2020) after thirty years in high school. When I started teaching, we still typed everything on electric typewriters and then had someone in the office run copies on a mimeograph machine. (I can still smell that warm ink!) The coolest technology I used was a reel-to-reel movie projector and a filmstrip projector that advanced by itself instead of giving me the beep to advance it.

From that first year in 1989, I saw the projector morph briefly into a giant laser video disc (the size of a record album), and then into the DVDs that I air-played onto my Apple TV. At one time I had purchased my own LCD projector since we had only a few in the whole school for teachers to check out. Now, it sits on a shelf because nobody wants it.

I spent a lot of time in the early nineties confiscating pagers, since only doctors and drug dealers needed to carry them. Later I told kids that they were crazy if they thought I could not see the glow of their forbidden cell phones in the dark half hour before school started. However, in the last few years I kept an iPad in my classroom for kids to use during class when they did not have a phone of their own.

I have always dreaded having to call parents – as probably most teachers do. When I started, I had to go to the clinic or office to get parents’ phone numbers and then to a workroom to find a phone. Eventually we got phones in our classroom, and one of my favorite discipline techniques was to look up the parent’s phone number on my electronic gradebook and call them from my classroom during class: “I just thought you’d like to know what your son is doing in my class right now. Oh, of course you can talk to him!”  Covid-19 and distance learning raised my game even higher, though, when I got my Google Voice number and could then text parents from home. I really wish I had had that sooner!

Although much has changed over thirty years, the fundamentals have not. I am still friends with Cyndee Smith, who supervised my internship and then was my first department head, and the skills and concepts she taught me then are the same skills and concepts that I have honed and taught to my own interns and to the first-year teachers I have mentored.  Thank you, Cyndee, for your patience as I learned these lessons.

For you, Reader, I have tried to write this guide the way I would want to read it. Do not feel the need to read it from beginning to end. Instead, go to the chapter that you need now, and then read the rest when you have time. Trust me, I know how stretched your time is: and I promise not to waste it. Keep in mind that I spent my career in high school, and while this information will work for middle school as well, I cannot speak with any authority on teaching elementary students. You folks are on your own!

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Dory Smith started teaching in 1989, retired in 2020, and taught high-school students ranging from freshmen to seniors, and ranging from mentally handicapped to Advanced Placement. She was also a member of the Army Reserve Military Police Corps and was deployed to Desert Storm and Bosnia during her teaching career. She currently lives in central Florida with her husband and two German Shepherds.