Tag: lesson planning

In which I have to start posting earlier

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

No school again tomorrow, so we’re doing another synchronous day, and I looked at my Algebra class and realized that for the life of me I have no idea what the hell the next unit is supposed to be. One of the things that has really frustrated me about this year is that no one seems to be in control of the scope and sequence for either of my classes, and there’s been a lot of flailing around as we try and figure out what to teach when. The district hugely mistiming both of our ILEARN checkpoints so far hasn’t helped. We have a meeting tomorrow (virtual, of course, but the agenda mentions breakout rooms, so it’s going to be horrible) to try and iron some of this out, but for right now my Algebra kids are doing the same thing as my regular 8th graders tomorrow because whatever I plan for is going to change tomorrow afternoon anyway and I really don’t have the energy for this nonsense at the moment.

We’ve gotten maybe seven to eight inches of snow today— I went out and hit the driveway around 2:00, and there was between five and eight depending on where I measured, plus another inch or two since then. Hopefully we don’t get hammered overnight; I don’t want to have to schedule another driveway session in between classes or meetings.

Anyway, the call-out didn’t happen until after six, so it took me a minute to get all my shit set up, and now it’s 8:49 and I have no brain or energy left. I’ll try to post tomorrow when it’s still daylight outside. This thing where I never post before 8 PM lately needs to stop.

In which I feel a bit better

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Apparently the way to get a lot done at work is to be really, really depressed all day on Sunday. I got to school this morning and discovered my usual Monday morning meeting was cancelled, and man, I did not get enough sleep last night to be emotionally or physically capable of sitting alone in my classroom for an hour, staring at the walls. So somehow, instead of falling asleep at my desk, I managed to … turn that into getting a lot of shit done? Sure, I’ll take it, because it is damn near unprecedented for it to be Monday evening and for me to have one class completely planned out for the rest of the week (okay, I haven’t done the photocopying, but that’s not a big deal) and one class planned out through Thursday. That’s not a thing.

Hell, I even did my after-school tutoring today instead of tomorrow at the request of the kids involved, so technically that’s done a day early too.

This must be exactly how Mick Jagger feels every day.

Completely random observation: how is it possible that I have been writing on this blog for over a decade and not only do I 1) not have a “news” category, but 2) it never occurred to me that I didn’t have a “news” category until yesterday? I mean, granted, most of the posts that might get categorized as “news” end up under “politics,” but … damn, that just doesn’t feel right. Also not feeling right: adding a new category this late in the game. I think I’m stuck with my current ones forever.

I’ll stop talking about school soon, I promise

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I was rudely tricked into doing classroom coverage today, when I made the mistake of walking past a classroom that did not have a teacher because she had gone home with a sudden illness. Apparently the office had not sent anyone to the room yet. I guess I’m not the type to just walk off when a kid comes out into the hallway and tells me there’s no adult in the room.

I’m sure it would have been fine.

At any rate, tomorrow will somehow be the first day of the school year with a completely normal schedule, and my lesson plans currently include a quiz about me and then a bunch of attempting to learn names. My retention rates run from 90-100% in the mornings to less than 50% with my sixth hour, so apparently I need to do some work on that. I tell the kids that I get the first two weeks of the school year for free and after that they get a piece of candy every time I can’t remember their names. I usually learn the girls’ names faster but the girls are also more likely to be the two kids in every class where it’s May and I’m still calling two of them by the same name. I think I’m also going to put my seating charts together tomorrow; that’ll help.

Also, for the first time this year I’ve decided to keep a running count on the board of 1) what day in the school year it is, 2) how much of the school year is gone, and 3) how much of the school year is left. Only I’m doing it using fractions, and I feel like if I make a biggish deal at the beginning of each class period I might do some good in teaching them how to reduce fractions, especially since there are exactly 180 days in the school year and 180 has a lot of factors. So, just as an example, since this is day 3 (and I’ve decided, arbitrarily, to consider the current day “done” for the purposes of the fractions):

3rd Day of the school year
1/60 of the year completed
59/60 of the year remaining

And tomorrow will be:

4th Day of the school year
1/45 of the year completed
44/45 of the year remaining

… and so on. I dunno, it’ll entertain me, and fully 2/3 of what I do every day is done with the explicit goal of entertaining myself.

I’d give y’all the quiz just for the hell of it, but there’s too many pictures of people I don’t have permission to post pictures of online, so it’s not going to work. It ought to be a fun day, though, which I will make up for by throwing a diagnostic test at them on Wednesday that’s going to be … discouraging. For all of us.

And here we go

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I would typically expect to be Sundaying pretty hard at the end of Spring Break, but that’s not what’s happening. I’m not stressed at all. That said, I’ve had one hell of a time figuring out what the hell I’m going to do with my students this week, and more specifically what I’m going to do with them tomorrow, and I finally settled on a super basic, 20-question paper assignment with a mix of stuff from the last quarter on it. I’m titling the assignment “I Hope You Remember Math.” They’re all going to be lethargic and asleep tomorrow anyway so I think trying to start anything new (and the next unit is probability) is probably going to work against me. Then Tuesday through Friday on the basic principles of probability, skip the test, and two weeks of ILEARN review? Sure. Why not.

And after that … well, I chose the image up there for a reason. Right now I don’t even know what classroom I’m supposed to be in tomorrow (I was supposed to be back in my original room, but the weekly staff bulletin says otherwise, but the weekly staff bulletin also shows significant signs of having been copy-pasted from the last weekly staff bulletin) and that makes it really hard to plan. So tomorrow is going to have to be the last gimme day for a while, but that’s fine. It’s all fine. It’ll all be fine.

Unless the world blows up or something, but I’m gonna try not to worry about that too much.

On the most minor of milestones

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I have no further lesson planning to do for the 2023-24 school year. I know exactly what my students will be doing each class period for the rest of the school year.

Now, granted, “what they will be doing” on some of those days is nothing.

And I have some practice finals I need to write this weekend. Like, I know what days they’re doing them, but they don’t actually exist yet.

But the planning? That’s done.

Hmmmm

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

… nah, I got nothing. I’ve planned out lessons for tomorrow and Tuesday and I think that’s all I can manage right now. No brain; only PS5. And book.

Today really got away from me

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life1 Comment

I’m not Sundaying— I swear I’m really not– but man, I feel like I really let the day get away from me today. I was feeling great at about 12:30– I had about 75% of my grading done for the weekend, although no actual planning yet, and I felt like that left me in really good shape to get everything else I needed to do done. Then, somehow, lunch took two fucking hours, and while I’m intellectually certain I had to be doing other things than eating a couple of veggie burgers and some chips between 12:30 and 2:30 I will be damned if I can remember what any of those things might have been.

My son has a D&D group every Sunday from 4:00 to 6:00. As he is not the most social kid on the planet (he is great around people– better than he thinks he is, really– but in general would always prefer to be at home playing games, which I can hardly fault him for) I like to encourage anything that gets him out of the house and interacting with other human beings. That said, the absolutely lovely people who host this gaggle of sixth-graders several weekends a month live a million miles away, and it’s three hours out of every Sunday for my wife and I as well since returning home between dropping him off and picking him back up is stupid. Anyway, by the time I got out of the shower (that’s correct, I ate lunch before showering) it was time to go, and then I had to finish the grading and the planning, and oh right I owe the Internet a blog post, and now it’s 8:04 and I cannot shake the feeling that I’ve forgotten something important that I had planned to do today.

I mean, the lawn didn’t get mowed, but I didn’t want to mow the lawn, so whatever.

Oh, and I lost half an hour to trying to buy a Roblox gift card with the generic Visa gift card that he got for his birthday this weekend, and that type of fuckery generally makes me want to punch things.

The good news is that there’s no reason– he said— why this shouldn’t be a relatively easy week at work, and last week was dandy. The early in the year exhaustion ought to be starting to abate this week too. So for the most part, things are looking up, at least until I realize I forgot to pay the mortgage or whatever it was. Looking forward to that.

A miracle

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I have written lesson plans– well, okay, I have planned– well, okay, I have determined subject matter— for every day of school between now and Winter Break, which — especially the way I’ve phrased it– may not sound like the miracle that it is.

That was a very complicated sentence and I dare you to diagram it.

Anyway, I’ve been doing this job long enough that for the most part the difficulty in “lesson planning” is just deciding what to do, and the actual doing is all muscle memory by now even if I’m doing a lesson I’ve never done before, or changing up an old one. I can spin a couple of sentences of “plan” into a 47-minute lesson with next to no difficulty at all, but the actual process, the this-before-this-and-don’t-forget-this of it all is the difficult part. I’ll need to devote some time to actually writing the assignments for tomorrow for both my Algebra and Pre-Algebra classes, which will take a few minutes, but that calendar on Canvas? That shit’s filled out. And that’s a wonderful feeling.

I might even put it all up on the wall for the kids tomorrow so they can look at it. I went out and bought some stuff for the classroom today, as I’ve got most of my setup done and it’s time to turn my attention to the walls. The room’s feeling more like me with every passing day, although the lack of windows still hurts my soul, and I need another lamp. One more lamp in there and I can start turning the lights off while they work and rely on the LEDs and the lamps to keep the room lit enough that my ancient-ass eyes can see. Right now I’m still just too blind for it.