No one who regularly reads this or knows me will be surprised by this, but I am a planner. Some of that was built into my DNA, but becoming a yearbook teacher is really what cemented it into my daily life. You can't end up with a good yearbook unless you have a lot of plans laid out. I plan lessons, units, days, and semesters. Even during the summer, I make a to-do list for the following day before going to sleep at night.
Good plans rely on good information. For yearbook, you need to know when and where the volleyball game will be played. You need to know when the dress rehearsal is for the play and how many cast members there are. For lesson planning, you need to know what supplies you have available and whether your schedule that day involves a shorter time frame or missing seniors.
Today, I was dressed in my walking gear and was putting on my shoes to head out to church. It's a 90-minute walk, so I have to be ready to leave between 7:20 and 7:30. It was ten after seven when I noticed that the sky seemed a little darker than normal. I supposed that I should perhaps look at the weather forecast, and I found that we are expecting remnants of tropical storm Claudette to be coming through this area for most of the day. Somehow, in all of my planning, I had missed that little detail. Now, I had to look at my other options. Will I drive to church or watch it online? I can accomplish the same thing in different ways, so I have to figure out which way is preferred.
School is that way too. No matter how good a planner you are, times will happen when you miss important details. You forgot it was a half-day when you planned a test. There's a pep rally you forgot would take away one section of your 8th-grade class. You suddenly realize there isn't any salt in the lab. You have to adapt. Salt is an easy fix; you can run to the store quickly. You might even find some in the teacher's lounge. The half-day might pose a trickier problem. Moving a test isn't always easy because it might run into other tests, so do you move it or do you shorten it to fit into a shorter testing time? The answer to that depends on your schedule and the particular material covered on the test. Losing one of your class sections is annoying because you either have to plan something for the other classes that is valuable but doesn't need to be made up in the other section or you are going to have to teach that one class really fast the next day to catch up.
Here's the point I am making. You should absolutely plan. Flying by the seat of your pants on a daily basis is irresponsible. But, you will suffer if you stay rigidly fixed to those plans because school is filled with plan changers. Adaptability MUST be part of your makeup, or you will lose your mind. After a few years of experience, this becomes easier because you know what the ultimate goals are and can keep your eye on those while figuring out a different way to achieve them.
By the way, this is an important life skill to teach students. We all know that no matter how long you give students to do a project, many of them will wait until the last few days and cram them in. You can help with that by putting in checkpoints along the way; I'm not saying that they can't lie on them, but at least you are putting a structure in place that shows what adaptable planning looks like. On any project I have that lasts longer than two weeks (I have three), I ask students to submit a timeline during the first week. I ask them to look at their schedule and plan realistically rather than idealistically. On each checkpoint, I ask if they are still on schedule because I want them to know that not being on the planned schedule is acceptable if there is a good reason, not just procrastination. Life happens. If the answer is no, I ask what their plan is for adapting to those changes. Can they catch up, or do they need to readjust their timeline?
The content of a project is important, but the skill of adaptive planning will remain with them throughout their lives. Teach it. Model it. It matters.
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