How I Survived the First Five Years of Teaching is about the struggles an educator faced and how she overcame those struggles in her early days of teaching. The journey begins with the challenges she faced after graduating from college and the difficulties she encountered trying to acquire her first teaching job. It then takes the reader through the different obstacles she confronted each school year. It's a detailed account about how she endured and overcame student misbehavior and disrespect, a lack of support and cooperation from her principal and assistant principal, disrespect from parents, lack of parental support, lack of student motivation, and her battle with depression.