Hanging On By A Lanyard

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

Nobody hands you a manual for this job. So I wrote one.

Teacher prep programs will teach you how to write a lesson plan. They will not teach you how to grade 150 essays in a weekend, survive a 6th period on a Friday before a holiday, or answer a parent email that starts with "I don't think you understand my child."

Hanging On By A Lanyard is the guide nobody hands you on day one: a practical, honest, occasionally funny survival manual for the actual job of teaching middle and high school, not the version of it that shows up in a syllabus.

This isn't a classroom management book (I already wrote that one). This is everything around the teaching: the planning, the grading, the meetings, the burnout, the phone calls home, and the quiet art of keeping your sanity while doing one of the hardest jobs there is.

Inside, you'll find real systems and real talk on:

• Managing 30-plus students without losing your mind

• Planning when you have zero planning time

• Grading without drowning, including a numbered rubric system you can use tomorrow

• Parent communication that doesn't ruin your evening

• Behavior and phones, survival-level version

• Absences, missing work, and the chase for both

• Student motivation when nothing seems to be working

• Meetings, testing season, and surprise sub days

• Burnout, boundaries, and actually keeping your sanity

This isn't a guide about becoming a superhero teacher who never gets behind, never gets tired, and never eats lunch standing over a trash can.

It's a guide about surviving the real version of this job, with systems that actually hold up and permission to not do everything perfectly.

Take what works. Skip what doesn't. And go refill your coffee. You've earned it.