One of the reasons that the first few years of teaching are much harder than later years is because teachers basically start out with nothing. Ideas and lessons come from other experienced teachers, but teachers have to try the lessons and worksheets, see how they work, and then edit them a couple of times. After a couple of rounds of edits, the lessons are fairly robust, and most of the substantive changes have already happened.
When I started teaching, I covered heat and calorimetry in chemistry. After I taught it for a couple of years, the topic was dropped from the chemistry curriculum, and is now covered in physics instead. Now that I’m teaching physics, I’m teaching the topic for the first time since my second year of teaching. I had a worksheet that I had created in 2004 or 2005 on specific heat capacity, so I glanced over it to make sure it was indeed applicable to the topic (which it was), and I naïvely gave it out as a homework assignment.
It turned out to be a poorly-designed worksheet that consisted of several almost identical challenging problems, with no scaffolding or gradual building of skills and level of difficulty. I ended up rewriting the entire worksheet. However, it was kind of nice to have a tangible piece of evidence of how my ability to put together an assignment has developed from my second year of teaching to my ninth. It also makes me wonder whether seven years from now I’ll look back on what I have from this year and feel a similar level of disdain for something that I’m currently feeling good about.
