Meet Keaton. Fresh out of college, he just married a teacher and moved to a new state. The school hired him, too, perhaps in order to secure his wife's contract. But nonetheless, he's now in a classroom.

Twenty years ago, I would have expected him to have an extremely rough schedule, several duties, extracurriculars and even a dreaded study hall to manage — an almost-hazing-like first year. But that was 20 years ago, right?

Unfortunately, no. It is September 2014, and this is happening now. Even after 20 years of research on the importance of teacher induction programs, intelligent graduates join our profession, only to be sorted out in a Harry Potter-like hat ceremony.

The state of Washington has induction standards. The hiring standard contains a key element called "Placement of New Teachers" with one descriptor that reads as follows: "School staff members contribute to the success of beginning teachers and their students by sharing responsibility for creating a manageable teaching assignment (e.g., room location, class size and composition, number of preparations, extra duties)."

Keaton's schedule might receive the lowest score on the 1-4 Likert scale for this descriptor:

Breathless — and not the good kind. Breathless thinking about how a teacher with a firm foundation in content, pedagogy and content pedagogical knowledge might exist with this schedule for an entire nine months.

However, this isn't breathless — this is gasping for air. You see, Keaton does not have a degree in education. He was prelaw: a bachelor's in business administration and political science. Keaton played college basketball, took athletic coaching courses and even sneaked in some his favorite history courses.

One might think this teaching schedule was tailor-made for him, a differentiated schedule even. That person doesn't need to live it. For 180 days.

I intend to keep track of Keaton, to offer words of hope, perhaps a few nuggets of wisdom. But frankly, I don't think Keaton will teach long — and maybe he shouldn't. The achievement levels of his giant list of students will be one piece of evidence, nine months from now.

I might not have enough time for Keaton, though, because Danielle is on my radar, too. Danielle has a college degree and two years of teaching experience under her belt. She taught in a large urban city in the Midwest experiencing solid professional development, an outstanding mentor and other qualities indicative of a solid induction program.

Danielle and her husband moved to a rural part of Iowa, a community much like where Danielle grew up, a community whose ethnic makeup has drastically changed in the past 20 years — now 35 percent Hispanic.

Armed with current teaching practices and high expectations for her kindergarten students, she began preparing long before the first day of school. As many teachers bristle with the quip, "I'd love to be a teacher and have three months off each year," Danielle works feverishly throughout the summer, while also moving her home and family.

The other kindergarten teachers, many years her senior, welcome her with smiles but that is where the welcome wagon ends. Covert planning sessions without her, shared jokes without explanation, and hushed playground conversations characterized the first few weeks.

After repeated attempts to meaningfully collaborate, the most egregious move was Curriculum Night. Danielle had some experience and realized that nights such as these often have tradition and expectations, so she asked her colleagues if there were particular student products that were common place to display for these parents of first-time students.

Her colleagues told her the evening was "no big deal" and didn't demand "any extra preparation." On Curriculum Night, Danielle was exiting her classroom to go home for a few hours, planning to return when parents would meet her there. She stopped short in the hallway, noticing her colleagues feverishly setting up tables with class "copycat" books, created to show parents their work of the first few weeks.

Copycat books, a popular literacy strategy in the 1990s, often used one sentence from a text and asked each student to make a page in their class version of the original book. Students usually wrote one word in each sentence.

Fighting back tears, Danielle re-entered her room and called her aunt, also a primary teacher at another school: "What am I supposed to do now?"

Danielle did what a professional does: displayed her students' authentic writing and explained to parents that night that her students write about what matters to them, in the best way they know how. It's her job throughout the year to make that writing better and better, one letter, one word and one sentence at a time.

In actuality, her children's writing is far more advanced and showed much more evidence of taking risks than the work from other classrooms. Their children correctly spelled their word in the fill-in-the-blank sentence, clearly with adult support.

Although this experience feels like a seventh-grade novel or after-school special, this is only part of the drama. Danielle's principal knew she would be a good hire and wanted to positively impact more than just her class of students. He thought a strategic move would be to leverage her literacy expertise.

Since she was already implementing "The Daily 5" in her classroom, Danielle was assigned the task of leading a book study with — you guessed it — her kindergarten teacher colleagues.

So a summer book study took place with varying levels and iterations of resistance. The new school year has now begun with an implementation requirement from the principal. Now Danielle's colleagues have questions for her.

I know many principals who love to hire teachers that are new to the profession, teachers hungry to please and receive feedback on their performance. These leaders often do this with the best intentions, for both students and the colleagues they hope these young teachers will impact.

By adding extra teacher leadership responsibilities and "opportunities," we require them to grow simultaneously in two different arenas: what learning looks like with impressionable and often motivated students, and what learning looks like with experienced and sometimes unwilling adults.

We have done a great deal of talking for the past 20 years about teacher induction, but current practice often does not look much different. Our knowing-doing gap is still quite prevalent in many places. We place novice teachers in untenable positions with students and adults, later feigning surprise when they leave our school and/or the profession.

It is time to stop eating our young.