I’m starting my Sunday night ritual on Monday night. Since it was Presidents’ Day, and we had no school, I earned a reprieve yesterday. But tonight I’m back at it. At least an hour or two each Sunday night is devoted to prepping for the upcoming school week. Okay, who am I kidding? Each Sunday night I prep for Monday - any day beyond that is pretty much fuzzy.
I’ll never be one of those teachers who can yank out a three ring binder (though I do have plenty of them in storage) and show you my curriculum. Our district would like us all to have that, but (to speak frankly) that ain’t happenin’ here. No way.
I could lie and tell you that I love the spontaneity of teaching and planning so far ahead kills that. But the truth is that I’m pretty much a lazy lesson planner. Well, that’s at least part of the truth. If you know me and have been to class or seen me dashing to the copier or bouncing ideas off you, you know that I’m anything but lazy in my teaching. But the truth is I just don’t like knowing on Sunday what I’m going to be doing at 10:37 am during second block on Friday.
First off, what if I think of something better to do? Second, what happens if the class doesn’t react well to other things that lead up to that future assignment? Third, what happens if we haven’t progressed quickly enough?
I guess I like teaching intuitively or from the gut too much. I like walking into class and thinking “What are we going to do today?” That all depends on what I feel like doing and what the students feel like doing. Not what some binder thinks we should be doing.
Now I know the curriculum people are going nuts reading this, but I’m not saying I’m doing nothing. I’m not saying I’m ignoring benchmarks and standards (well, maybe the ones about teaching Latin roots and transitive forms of verbs). I’m just saying we will work on those in our own ways.
Last summer I was in the school digging up some sci-fi stories that I was going to use in my ALC summer class when I ran into a colleague here. I asked her what she was doing in school in late June. She said that she would be teaching a new class springs quarter (still nine months away) and she was getting the curriculum planned. I was stunned. That is one teacher who has it together (though, to be honest, I suspect she was in there doing that because she had applied for some curriculum development funds and was getting paid quite nicely to be putting her lessons together nine months early). Now that I think of it, if the district is willing to pay me to put together some three ring binders and pay me handsomely to do it, well, I’ll quit typing and dig out those binders!
Not that I’d ever use the binder, mind you. But if someone ever takes over one of my classes, it would at least look like I did.
I guess part of my problem lies in the fact that I’m too much of a student to be well planned out. In the novel “A Separate Peace,” Gene (the protagonist) is competing to be the best student in his class at this expensive, preppy private school. Gene knows he’s got his best friend, Finny, licked because Finny is a great athlete and his devotion to sports and other hi-jinx related to being a jock will doom his grades. Gene worries about another kid in his class (whose name escapes me, Chet Douglas maybe?). But after a few weeks, Gene realizes that the kid is too passionate of a scholar to be a great student. For whenever they study Frost, the kid falls in love and reads all of the Frost poems he can get his hands on, instead of just the ones assigned, and he falls behind in other work. If they study a specific battle from history, the kids goes nuts and reads all about the entire war, and he falls further behind. On the other hand, Gene knows how to play the game of being a student. He reads the poem and he reviews his notes on the battle. He prepares for the test and aces it and then forgets everything and moves on to the next task.
I’m like Gene’s nemesis when it comes to teaching.
For instance, in every composition class I teach (from tenth graders up to my college class) we write several narrative essays. I’ve taught maybe 50 comp classes over the year. Every time I’ve taught it differently. I learn from each class session and that impacts the next. When I’m researching the narrative unit, I’ll sit down to find some sample narratives and I’ll be damned if I don’t just end up reading all the samples and forget about coming up with ideas for the unit. Or I’ll scrounge up some narratives from past student folders. And I’ll be damned if I don’t just end up reading through all the essays in their folders and totally forget about time (this happened, blissfully, over conferences). Or I’ll dig through some books by my gods - Romano, Elbow, Christensen, Hauser - and I’ll end up looking at their bibliographies and the next thing I know I’m expecting $150 worth of books next week from amazon.com.
See, I should be doing my lesson plans but I’m blogging about teaching instead! Talk about practicing what I preach, eh?
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