Teacher advice

Because I am a first year teacher, I have been getting all sorts of advice from all sorts of places. I've been trying to go to staff development courses which are full of suggestions also. Some of the advice is honestly just beyond me. It's more than I can do right away. My support provider through BTSA (Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment- it's a program to help new teachers out, but we also lose our credential if we don't complete the course within 5 years of receiving our credential) has made a few suggestions that I'm really trying to implement, but I don't really understand what I'm doing. She's told me to try to organize my students and gave a few suggestions on how to do that. Frankly, I wish she had given me suggestions on how to organize myself. I have papers strewn everywhere on my desk. I grade some classes through checkmarks, some through stamps, some through papers they turn in. I frantically scurry around the classroom trying to give credit to those who have finished what they're doing and sometimes I don't get to everyone. Then I have to count on my students being organized enough to keep their papers until I check them off the next day. It's pretty chaotic. I'm going to try to implement a folder system like she suggested, but the main point of what she was trying to drive home is that I have to choose a way I want their papers to look and then hold them to it. The problem is that I don't have any better sense than they do of what I want their assignments to look like. I'll have to buy some milk crates and manila folders and come up with some ideas, but that sort of set up work is really hard. It takes creativity about something I hardly understand. I'm sure it will make my life about a million times easier, but I'm a little intimidated by getting it started.

As I was saying before I got sidetracked into describing one particular type of advice, there are a lot of different kinds of advice I've been getting. A lot of the advice is really helpful. As I said before, some of the advice is really hard to follow. Some of it isn't entirely practical. Some of it is teacher specific, and the people giving the advice don't even realize it. Something I think I've realized is that every teacher has their own style and what works for them won't necessarily work for you. Or perhaps more accurately, there are many correct ways to teach and some of them will fit for you and some won't. For instance, here is a short list of advice I have been given from some of my coworkers:
-When you have a real troublemaker, you just have to publicly humiliate them. Otherwise they will be trouble for the whole school year. It also sends a message to the other students not to act up.
-Never have a public confrontation with a student. It will only escalate any issues and then their friends will start causing you trouble also to defend the person you called out.
-Sometimes you just have to shout to get your kids' attention.
-If you keep your voice low, the students will quiet down to hear you. If you raise your voice to talk over them, they will only get louder.

There's plenty of other advice I've been given as well. Not all of it was as obviously contradictory as the above examples, but it still falls into the same category of "works for you." There's no guarantee it'll work for me, and a lot of teachers don't even realize that. I don't know entirely how to classify the difference between generic good advice and "works for you" advice. It's one of those things I'll probably realize eventually. Until then, I gotta keep listening to advice and implementing all that I can. If it fails miserably, perhaps it was "works for you" advice all along.