Changing Your Plans - That's Life

Teachers live by plans.  Day plans, unit plans, lesson plans, year long course maps, curriculum guides, etc.  We submit plans for review and approval, and most of us plan about a week ahead (Note:  if you are new teacher reading this, don't feel bad.  You are probably planning two hours ahead.  If you get a whole day ahead, pat yourself on the back.)

Because we make so many plans, we tend to get very attached to them.  Then, there is a fire drill or a pep rally we forgot was coming.  Half our class is out on a field trip we didn't know about or leaves early for a swim meet.  The thing it took me longest to learn as a new teacher was how long things would take.  I would have a plan I thought was a class period only to have it last twenty minutes (or three days).  It was just impossible to know how long something was going to take if I had never done it before.  What happens to your plans then?

Our plans are lovely ideals of how a lesson will go, but they are just that.  They are ideals.  We don't live in an ideal world.  Stuff is going to happen.  Equipment is going to break.  Projector bulbs are going to burn out.  How you react to those things sets an example for your students.  You don't want them to wig out, so you shouldn't either.  You want them to be flexible, so you have to model flexibility.

As you get farther along in teaching, you get better at predicting how long things will take.  Every class is different though.  What took two days with last year's physics class might take three days this year.  The kids are different, and you may have explained it a little differently.  You get better at predicting the rabbit trails.  For example, when I teach about the ear, I know to expect questions about ears popping on planes and tubes and now can work in time for those questions.  No matter how long you teach, you will still encounter times when you just can't stick to the plan.

Don't be afraid to regroup.  You want to teach, not just cover the material in the curriculum.  If your students aren't getting the material, push the test out a day.  Every year, I walk this line.  I realize that there may be a chapter I don't get to do (or that I have to combine two chapters at the end and just teach the essentials from that chapter).  It has taken me a long time to come to this conclusion, but I believe it is right.  I would rather teach the things I do get to well than get to everything by doing it badly.