My children had two different first year teachers when she was in elementary school. The first one taught my daughter and she was simply awful. She talked down to parents, refused to be corrected (unless you told her in no uncertain terms in Spanish that she was wrong – if you only spoke English you were up a creek), and lost her temper a lot. You could hear her screaming in the lobby of the school.
She also liked to team up the good students, such as my daughter, with the difficult students, typically boys who couldn’t sit still or who had behavior problems. It dragged my daughter down so much that I finally had to go tell the teacher that if she kept insisting on my daughter doing her job, that she should split her salary. She finally went too far and shoved a kid into the wall. She was transferred to a younger grade. great, so she had even smaller victims
My son, however, had a first year teacher who was a delight. She welcomed parents as partners to her classroom projects and several times during the year devised activities that celebrated the different cultures represented in her class.
She also admitted that she didn’t know much about ADD and other problems and was always happy to read books parents recommended to her or have parent conferences to jointly work out a method of helping students learn. She was a terrific teacher and was on her way to be an even better one, but she was in the reserves and got called up.
When I worked with young children, I broke my lesson plan down into 15 minute sections, scheduled in “designated wiggle times” (everyone would stand up and wiggle everything they had as hard as they could) so the kids could let out excess energy, and always made sure to have several “extra” 5 to 10 minute projects so we could switch mid-stream if the kids lost interest.
Good luck!