Thriving as a Special Educator Tip #9: Stop Reinventing the Wheel

Something that somehow did not occur to me until years after I started teaching was that I wasn’t the first person to ever have taught. I mean I know that is a lot to take in but I did not actually invent teaching nor even special education. But, from the amount of time I spent recreating the wheel my first few years, you would think that I really did. 

Here are some of the ways that I tried to reinvent the wheel:

• I created my own behavior program from scratch
• I created my own behavior contracts from scratch
• I wrote all of own insanely detailed lesson plans… from scratch
• I made my own IEP templates. They all sucked and got thrown out years later, but I made them.

You know– I can’t even remember all of the different things I made each year but I was ALWAYS making something. And that’s great- I mean I now sell a lot of the things that I made. The problem was that a lot of times I was reinventing the wheel. I have written a lot about how I asked for materials and begged, borrowed and stole from colleagues– but I didn’t do that at the beginning. I was way more of a forge ahead on my own in the dark type of person than an ask for help person. As time went on, I got better at google, at getting materials from colleagues, and learning how to modify rather than recreate curriculum and materials. 

So this post is basically an expansion of the last one on saving time– and reflects my eternal hobby horse which is that you matter and your time matters so treat it like the precious resource it is. Please note I am not judging your important hours on Insta or TikTok or doom scrolling– I am there too. That is your time so do with it as you will– but get more of it back by not recreating the wheel. There is a lot of crud out there on the internet and, sadly, in teachers’ closets and bookcases but there is also a lot of amazing stuff out there that you can modify and use and save time with.