Today was my final examination period for the majority of my classes. I had three classes to proctor, so I had a lot of free time to use planning my classes. I decided that instead of reading for pleasure as I had done in one of my examinations before I received a single review with a bad score, I’d put my time into planning a few classes for the rest of the week.
I went about drawing lots of inspiration from all the books I’ve acquired through the years about classroom activities and lesson planning to construct a few new ideas for lessons I’ll do next semester with my students. I was looking for long term reusable ideas in bulk form. I was grabbing a lot of stuff from different books, taking notes, highlighting, and doing all sorts of work during my examination period while my students toiled away.
I even devised a clever activity for my evening class during that time which went over really well. All it took was four hours of brainstorming and planning to get it done and typed up. It was one of the best classes I had for a long time, but it took so much going into it that I’m worried I won’t be able to match that effort tomorrow.
I teach two of these weekday classes back to back, and it took around two hours per lesson planned in advance from scratch, so if I can find four hours of wasted time every single weekday I’ll be sure to have an awesome class…as long as only proctor tests, never need to grade, and have no other pressing deadlines or things I need to do ever again. The chances of that happening any time soon? Nil.
While theoretically I have vacation coming in two weeks time for a few weeks, I’ll be spending a few days at least planning classes and doing outlines for my next semester. If I plan a few weeks in advance I’ll be able to get ahead of my semester long classes, in theory. The daily grind classes simply require so much attention from me that I’ll only tread water at best. It takes time to make a good lesson, but as I learn how to make good lessons I can do more each day with less time required. Compounding the problem is a switch to new book full of different materials which will require an entirely new set of lesson plans.
Once again I’m teaching new stuff to high level students and need to bring my “A” game. While I was complaining that teaching the same book at my last class inspired creativity to keep the content fresh and challenged me as a teacher, being thrown into new class after new class is another way to force me to develop new ways of teaching. Rapid prototyping and faster turn-around. Gone are the days when I had months to craft the perfect lesson by practicing it with different students day after day. Now I have a few hours and I need to produce results or crash and burn. It’s still rewarding, but in a different way.
