Pretend Last Year's Blogging Didn't Happen - Because It Didn't

I'm just going to pretend that last year's blogging fiasco didn't happen.  Feel free to ignore all previous posts because they didn't happen.

We have settled in from the first week of school and are now officially in the swing of things.

It's my 16th year teaching, so you would think that by now, I would have all lesson plans, tests, and homework in a folder just ready to pull out.  You would think that I could operate on some kind of academic auto-pilot since I've been to the same destination so many times.  Somehow, however, lesson planning takes me almost as long as it did a decade ago.  I still find errors in the same slide I've been using for five years, and the physics problem I have assigned before turns out to be so much harder than I thought it was when I assigned it.  Writing a test takes less time because I can recycle some of my questions, but I still find that I have to stop kids in the middle of a test to say, "Wait, the correct answer to number 20 isn't there.  Everybody just put A, and I'll put that on my key."

It occurs to me that my students wouldn't want me to have everything exactly under control, and their parents wouldn't either.  They want me to be a competent professional, and of course I want that too.  That's not what I am talking about.  I mean that they would't want me on academic autopilot.

If I could put on an autopilot, I wouldn't be engaging because I wouldn't be engaged.  It would also mean that I hadn't looked for a better physics problem since the beginning.  It would mean that I hadn't changed that slide in ten years attempted a new way of approaching something in a lesson plan.

One of the best parts of teaching is that you get to try again every year.  You get to say, "That didn't work, so I won't do it again."  You get to adapt to new technology, new resources, and new kids.  You get to start again with people who don't know the mistake you made with it last year (unless their brother told them).  There is no other profession that gets to do that.