A final piece of advice one of my professors imparted to my class of senior Elementary Education majors before we all went off to our student teaching placements came in the form of the adage, "Don't reinvent the wheel."
She was specifically encouraging us to use resources like Teachers Pay Teachers to help us find teaching materials and not feel like we always needed to create everything for our lessons from scratch.
I never forgot that advice.
Because the moment that the words left her lips, I determined to start my own Teachers Pay Teachers shop where I would sell all the materials I created from scratch.
To be sure, I have purchased and downloaded plenty of teaching resources from TPT during my years in the classroom. So I did take her advice in the sense that it was intended...
...but I have also created so many of my own materials for my classes. I just can't help myself.
Sometimes as a teacher you really do need to create that worksheet that is perfectly aligned to your lesson because you won't find it anywhere else, but even when I find things that are probably close enough to get the job done, if my imagination is feeding me a dream of something better I need to make it myself! Working in international schools, I often found myself either 1) entirely without curriculum and being forced to find all my own materials or 2) looking at the textbooks that had been provided and thinking, "This is going to be meaningless or confusing to my students, it's completely culturally American and my kids are from all over the globe." Even when the curriculum is all laid out for me and appropriate for my audience, I usually want to embellish it or put my own spin on it.
I am not advising other new teachers to spend time they don't have creating the perfect resources. My professor's words of wisdom are certainly the better, more balanced advice.
Don't reinvent the wheel.
Use the tools already at your disposal and be smart with your time and lesson planning. Student teaching and your first couple of years in the classroom are already going to be enough of a challenge, so don't make it harder on yourself.
On the other hand, if you are anything like me and your creativity just seeps out into your teaching and you can't help but complicate your life because the creative complication is what fuels your passion for this profession – go for it.
I finally did.
I've always allowed my creativity to run a little rampant in the classroom, but just this past week I finally did what I resolved to do all those years ago at the start of my teaching career and I posted my first few materials to TPT.
In honor of my professor and her very good advice I couldn't help but only sometimes heed, I named my TPT store Reinvented Wheel.
