See Me After Class by Roxanna Elden

I ran across Roxanna Elden’s excellent “See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers” while killing time in a bookstore– gravitating, as usual, to the education section. Elden, a National Board Certified Teacher in Miami, has put together a terrific handbook of non-traditional advice and perspectives on practice. An excellent reference for new teachers, it’s also engaging for grizzled veterans–I found myself reading long passages, snorting gently and nodding. In the end, I had to buy the book. You should, too.

TIASL: I love this book! My absolute favorite part of the book was the long, annotated list of strengths that new teachers might bring to the classroom (Chapter 6, Your Teacher Personality). You noted that everyone who comes into teaching has at least a couple of these gifts. What inspired you to see new teachers as unique personalities, rather than inexperienced technicians needing strategies?

Click here to read the rest of the interview on Nancy Flanagan’s blog, Teacher in a Strange Land.

“This is not Chicken Soup for the Teacher’s Soul,” writes Roxanna Elden (Houston ‘02). “It’s more like ‘Hard Liquor for the Teacher’s Soul.‘” Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it captures the unsentimental tone of See Me After Class, an acerbic guidebook for novice teachers. A grab bag of advice, anecdotes, horror stories, and tales of triumph, See Me After Class offers straightforward professional advice with a wry twist.

It’s been almost twenty years since I taught in a K-12 classroom and more than a dozen years since I last supervised student teachers. So, readers probably appreciate that I tend not to have a lot to say when it comes to classroom instruction.

But I recently picked up a new book, Roxanna Elden’s See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers, which I wish had been around when I started teaching. Elden, a teacher down in Miami-Dade, skips the treacle and talks straight, with a heavy dose of practicality, a dash of cynicism, and wry humor. I dug it, and recommend it.

Click here to read the article on Rick Hess Straight Up.

“Elden covers topics with the humor so necessary for a teacher’s survival, among them classroom management, creating a teacher persona, reviving lessons that flop, troublemakers, what principals expect, and the downside high-stakes tests. This would be a great gift for a new teacher, or someone studying to become one.”

Click this link to read the full review at internet review of books.

“Elden’s book…  is a useful, empathetic guide to weathering the first-year lumps. The author jokes that this book is not chicken soup, but rather “Hard Liquor for the Teacher’s Soul.” I’d peg it somewhere in between— perhaps a frothy, satisfying Guinness for the teacher’s soul.”

Click here to read the rest of this article on Dan Brown’s blog at Teacher Leaders Network.

Dan Brown is also the author of my favorite first-year teacher memoir: The Great Expections School.

“Basically, this book rocks. Roxanna, who is hilarious (Dave Barry gave a quote for the front of her book y’all…that qualifies as officially sanctioned funny in my book), gives practical, manageable, do-able advice for new teachers. She talks about things like how to set up your “piles and files”, how to manage all the procedural paperwork and friends, there’s even a before school starts shopping list. A LIST! You know I was sold when I saw that the book included actual lists.”

Click here to read the full article on the blog.

“We need more voices like Roxanna Elden’s, offering guidance, sympathy and support to new teachers, so that they can overcome those difficult first few years and get to the part where they are actually doing what they went into the profession to do: effecting positive changes in the community.”

Read the rest of the article by clicking this link.

“While Neil Armstrong no doubt experienced some fear and loneliness as the first person to set foot on the moon, many educators say it couldn’t compare to the feeling on day one of a teaching career, when you close the classroom door and are alone with your first class — and your self-doubts. Often, young teachers struggle so much in the beginning of their careers they wonder if they have what it takes to be educators at all.”

Click here for this article and other new teacher resources in EducationWorld.com.

In the four years it took Hialeah High School teacher Roxanna Elden to publish her new book, See Me After Class, she received dozens of rejection letters, but where others might have found disappointment, she saw something more. Each letter, she noticed, was more detailed than the previous one. “No” became “maybe next time.” She collected all the letters in a packet and passed them out to students in her creative writing class to show them what writers have to go through.

“You have to know what progress looks like,” said Elden, 30, a language arts and creative writing instructor at Hialeah High since 2004. “Sometimes, it comes in the form of more personal rejection letters.” (click here to read this in the Miami Herald.)

“In her book See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers, Roxanna Elden sets out to provide teachers with that special brand of inspiration that teachers often need when the demands of the profession prove overwhelming.” TeachersCount.Org