::A Geek in Korea::

Due to the way schedules and deadlines work, we were expected to finish our books this week. I’ve finished books hundreds of pages we’ve been working on for months perfectly with this deadline. This deadline wouldn’t be a problem for most of my classes. I’ve been making copies and doing activities with some classes because I finished my books weeks ago. In lower level classes I had too much material to catch up from last term, which meant I couldn’t finish their books on time this term either.
I don’t go at an excessively slow pace, but I came to the realization that I had three classes that needed to finish several chapters in each of their books. Two of the classes needed to do testing just when I wanted to start increasing the per class page count, robbing me of time to try to complete the book. I would have been in a much better position if I hadn’t needed to give tests, or cover classes for other teachers preventing me from completing pages.

I told my director about the problem, and she told the teachers that I share the book with (Hello, pissed off coworker, here is more work for you!) I apologized for my mistake. Using my last class with my current “batch” of students for today, I went all out to try to finish the book I had for today to minimize the workload I was giving to other teachers. It’s a mad dash for the finish line instead of a leisurely stroll in the majority of my classes.

The material we had been doing wasn’t that hard. In fact, trying to fill out classes slowly enough in the beginning was the main problem with the material today. We’d spend fifty minutes on two pages to perfect it with the younger students. Review, review, review. I needed to do ten pages in fifty minutes to get their book done today!

We got down the business and started cranking out the readings. We did five units when we would usually only do one. My students were enjoying it, as we varied our reading. One half of the class would read one story, the other half would read the next unit. That meant they heard the same story fewer times, which makes them bored.

We’d read together, then individually. Even though we were covering five times the normal amount of material, everyone got to practice as much, or even more, than normally. I wouldn’t want to do it every day, but for a single lesson in an emergency, it wasn’t a bad time. We got everything done, the children practiced, and everyone understood as much as they normally do.

I finished the material in one book I needed to cover in one of the classes. Two more “emergency” classes tomorrow will be jammed back to back at the start of my day where I’ll do the same thing to minimize the material teachers will have to cover in extra classes.

This can be prevented by more cautious planning, as well as better book choices. I prevented this from happening in several of the next session classes. My director wanted to finish a 480 page book in less than 20 class hours. (That’s just insane.) If I hadn’t offered up some alternatives, I would have had to keep up this sort of mad dash pace for four hours a day for an entire month during summer intensive classes. No thank you.