The new teachers witnessing it all seem to fall into two camps. Ellis, who will be teaching fourth grade at Thomas Kelly Elementary School this year, said later that his experience as a basketball coach has fortified him for the classroom. But it's great to get some pointers on how to control the flow of the class and how to be the most effective teacher you can be. For new teachers, however, the first year can be less about effectiveness than retaining sanity. During another presentation, the group is shown a graphic that charts the attitude of the typical first-year teacher.
All teachers do.
His new teaching job represents a distinct career change for him, and he is anxious to get under way. After growing up in Grass Valley and then graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 1994, Ellis and a buddy took a 10,000-mile car tour of the country, during which he decided to move to Lake Tahoe and sell timeshares. But after three years of that I took a look around, and I realized that wasn't what I wanted to be. So he and his wife, Katy, a cardiac exercise physiologist, decided to move to Sacramento, where he enrolled in the teaching intern program at California State University, Sacramento. His last such stint at Kelly led to his hiring this year as a full-time teacher there.