
A One-Hour Calendar Setup Activity That Can Save You Planning Time (and Sanity) During the School Year

For a new teacher, thirty minutes of no-lesson-plan time feels like a week and a half in normal-people time. The earlier in the year this happens, the more panicked you will feel. Maybe you should have planned more diligently. Or maybe you did plan. Maybe you stayed up late cutting out each individual pepperoni slice for your “fraction pizza” lesson, but you didn’t have the experience to know the activity would only take fourteen minutes.
Either way, here you are, watching the first few kids finish off the assignment. You look at the clock. Thirty minutes until the bell rings. You start hoping there’s a PA announcement, a fire drill, a real fire—anything to keep you from having to answer the dreaded question “So what are we doing next?” (more…)
Here’s something I remember from my first year of teaching: I stayed up very late every night making detailed lesson plans. Maybe too detailed. Definitely too late.
Then, one day, I saw one of my more experienced colleagues’ lesson plan. And it looked something like this: Math: Multiplication X’s 4. (more…)
As a speaker at new-teacher orientation events, of the first issues I try to address is that new teachers aren’t just on information overload: they’re on super-important information overload. With this in mind, an organizational system I share with incoming teachers or their mentors is a strategy I call “A Big Box.” The supplies necessary for this system are: (more…)
What’s the difference between information overload and super-important information overload? Glad you asked!
The amount of information is the same: somewhere between a-tiny-bit-more-than-you-can-process-right-now and infinity. In the super-important version, however, each piece of new information comes with an urgent warning or moral implication meant to bump it to the front of the priority line. The result can be a paralyzing cocktail of panic, confusion, and shame. (more…)