Breathe.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Remember why you became a teacher in the first place.
Breathe.
That’s the advice Carla Warren’s educator friends gave her during her first months in front of the classroom in Putnam County.
They delivered the above to the novice first-grade teacher after her first day on the job.
They reinforced it after that first round of report cards and parent-teacher conferences.
And they definitely reminded her to practice all four after that first morning back from Christmas break when all the kids in her room — even the good ones — just didn’t want to behave.
Warren would go on to teach 20 years while earning a doctorate in education.
She now dispenses that same advice (with lots of coping mechanisms besides) through the West Virginia Department of Education.
She and her fellow educators working through her office are in Morgantown this week to mentor the mentors, as it were.
The Department of Education is hosting sessions in its mentorship program through today at Lakeview Golf Resort and Spa.
Teachers who go through the training will then mentor novice teachers back in their home counties, state Schools Superintendent Steve Paine said.
A total of 150 teachers from north-central West Virginia are taking the training here.
The idea, the superintendent said, is to give permanent detention to what has become a five-year rule of failure.
“Research has shown one of the main reasons teachers leave the profession in their first five years is a lack of support,” he said.
“There were no mentors when I was coming up,” Warren said, “but it was a different world then.”
Today, she said, teachers have to be social workers and psychologists on top of trying to work through the lesson.
“Kids have to deal with so much at home,” she said.
“There’s violence and the opioid crisis. And if they come to school, they bring all that with them.”
Other sessions will be in Charles Town, Flatwoods and Charleston.
That’s a lot of real estate from real work to be done, said Rhonda Jenkins, a retired Preston County teacher who is also teaching sessions in the program.
“What we really want to do is to keep our new teachers from feeling overwhelmed all the time,” she said.
“Good teachers make a difference and we need to keep ours in the classroom.”
Tweet @DominionPostWV. Email jbissett@dominionpost.com.
