Dialogue #2: Planning, Practice, and Depth of Instruction

Co-planning with you has been a big learning experience – I have a hard time with thinking on the fly in front of the class. I think this is because I have yet to develop those set of skills we always talk about. I like to have some structure to fall back on because I honestly don’t know how to keep a lesson going without it. I also should have been more honest with myself – and with you – about my comfort level with the content.

Co-planning with you has been a HUGE lesson for me, as well, and again I offer my sincere apologies for failing to think through your needs as a student for this week’s lesson.  I’ve come to a place in my practice where I have what sometimes feels like an instinct for my own lessons and pacing; as you’ve seen, I make a lot of adjustments on the fly and freely shift up lesson structure daily, sometimes from period to period and sometimes even in the middle of the lesson.  

I teach STUDENTS more than I teach CONTENT, and that tends to mean I’m very interactive – I do a lot of room comprehension checks, and if things aren’t going well, I have a few different ways in which I’ll modify to meet what the room seems to need.  There are ways in which this approach is very weak – the same lesson very rarely looks the same way twice, and I often have a hard time articulating why.  In many ways, it’s one of the reasons I thought this blog might be useful for BOTH of us – I wanted to be pushed to articulate my rationale for my strategies, and I also wanted you to have a forum where you could really pin me down about how and why I teach the way I do.

Dialogue #1: The Work-Life Divide and Classroom Realities vs. Ideology

However, I think the biggest take-home message has been your distinction between work and home life. I have always struggled with how I can cater to my students’ needs without sacrificing my own. I think your advice and encouragement to take time when I need it has been the biggest lesson this week. But where do you draw that line? When do you decide that you need to shut your phone off, or leave the classroom for the day? How do you tell a student that you need to leave and take care of yourself when they are asking for more help?

One of my greatest frustrations with the ideological mindset in education is something I would, for lack of a more politic name, describe as "the calling."  

Teachers are, in effect, given the responsibilities of a CEO: we have 120~300 employees whom we are responsible for directly managing, both professionally and personally.  We must create a mission and vision for our company, and a culture that will drive us towards those goals.  We must personally create all of the strategies and systems that make business possible, and are responsible for monitoring their success.

We can not fire our employees, many of whom do not even want the job - or to do the work, since the currency we pay in is not of value to them, currently.

But regardless, we are treated as, at best, middle-management.  Oversight is critical, intense, and demands demonstrable top-performers - in both numbers and employee satisfaction.  Pay is little better than for a line worker, though the hours usually run from a minimum of 50 to upwards of 90 a week.