Important thing I learned from my first year teaching

I am a very young teacher. I just turned 23. I'm 4'10 and teach freshman. I also have a septum piercing and red streaks in my hair so you can probably guess how often I was mistaken for a student. No biggy though. I teach biology and when I was doing my student teaching my CT constantly recommend that I take out the nose ring and wear a pants suit. Keep my hair up. I need to show these kids that I mean business or they won't take me seriously. When I first started at my school one of the older teachers who would constantly mistake me for a student to the point I'm sure she was doing it on purpose told me no kids would respect me looking like that. Told me I should take the ring out which I said if it's against the rules I will which it wasn't. Welp I ended up with a great relationship with a majority of my students and they mostly respected me. Because I treated them like PEOPLE. Yes we had boundaries. They knew I wasn't their friend. I'm their teacher but I respected them and they gave me the same back. I didn't change how I looked to get kids to respect me. I just had a bunch of kids give me gifts for teacher appreciation week and a lot of them are letters and they made me cry🥺

@Melanie I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I wasn't saying that teachers who dress more traditional don't have food relationships with their students. Just as long as you treat them like people and respect them, for the most part they will respect you. I kept being told to change how I looked and stuff so kids would respect me. I just treated them like humans beings. I know plenty of great teachers who dress more traditional. It was more so people thought I wouldn't be respected because I don't look traditional.