Lately, I keep hearing about getting classrooms to manage themselves. Can it be done? Yes, and men have left their footprints on the moon as well. I would like to see a few women step on the lunar surface before my life’s over, but progress comes in steps. I’m still crossing my fingers.

Hi, new teacher! Semi-new teacher? Curious regular reader? Whoever you are, welcome. Love you guys. I recommend last August’s posts. I created posts for new teachers that I hope will be helpful to newbies and others.

I taught middle-school in a tough area, an area of high poverty and low test scores. I know classes can manage themselves. I created a few of those classes. I also know some classes will never manage themselves. So let’s start with the understanding that self-propelled classes will always be a work in progress. Even when you get there, that day may come when your self-directed Mercedes drives straight into the river while following it’s nav system. Life, software and the reality of teaching can fail to cooperate with the best of plans.

Eduhonesty: This is my first post for newbies for the year. I want to offer a little reassurance in advance. You have likely been told you should climb all sorts of mighty mountains. You may be expecting to create that classroom that manages itself through the use of routines, regularly enforced expectations, engrossing lessons, and teacherly wisdom. Heck, you may succeed.

But you may not. Some districts are tougher than others. Some rare, individual classes in the best of districts are tough enough to make experienced teachers quit midyear. My younger daughter was part of a gifted class that sent subs out in tears, one poor woman who had been hit in the head with a flying book. Every group of kids has its own dynamics and not all of those dynamics will be within your control.

That’s O.K.! Try to win them all, but be prepared to lose some days. Be prepared to make multiple seating charts. Even the perfect chart can unravel as strangers become friends we had not met yet. That self-managing class? It’s a great goal and a class that knows its routines and requires little assistance with transitions should be one of your goals. But if you reach October, November, or even April and your class still does not manage itself, don’t feel bad. The Principal kept visiting the gifted class that threw the book. He never managed to get control of that class.

Hmmm… I can see readers thinking, “I don’t want any more reassurance, thank-you.”

Let me quantify things a little. In my last ten years of formal teaching, I had two classes that tended to go left whenever I wanted them to go right. But that was out of a little less than sixty classes. I also had classes of twenty-some bilingual students who barely needed their seating chart. They listened. Procedures and classroom hours flowed. We got the work done and we had fun.

All the research says the first two years of teaching tend to be tough. Teachers learn an enormous amount on the job. Frankly, I am not sure that crowd control can be taught any other way than to control crowds. Education classes can give tips to future teachers, but every teacher must find his or her own way. What works for one person may not work for another. What works in one class may not work in another class, for that matter.

So don’t beat yourself up if that self-managing classroom remains elusive. Year by year, you will get better. Professional development can help. Colleagues can help. Books can help. But time will help you most of all. You will stumble on techniques and tricks that work as you go, and you will learn the routines and phrases you need to make your classroom work. Trust yourself.

And if your classroom drives itself into the river, just haul it out, dry it off, make a few modifications to the nav system — and get back on the road.

As the artist Alex Noble once said, “Success is not a place at which one arrives but rather the spirit with which one undertakes and continues the journey.”