Pathways

I'm at a pretty satisfying place in my job right now. I'm far, far, far from being a particularly effective teacher, but I know how to improve now. At first, I really had no idea what I was doing. Everything was new. Each day, I had no idea what to expect or how to react. I'm still blindsided plenty often, but now I have enough of a grip on the day to day stuff that I'm able to improve on the little (yet still very important) things. More importantly, I know what things needs to be improved, and I even have a few ideas on how to improve it.

I was very naive when school first started. Some of the advice someone gave me was to do all my planning for the next week on Thursday night. It makes your Thursday miserable, but the next week runs so much smoother. So I decided I would try to do that. I made it a goal for the year. Ha! After spending egregious hours each night and morning just planning for the very next day, I gave up on that idea. It was really impractical. now that I'm starting to get a little experience, I'm starting to see that that wasn't really the right goal to start off with. At some point, I think I will plan out the next week each Thursday night, but that just doesn't make sense to do right now. Plans change depending on the students and what they understand or don't understand. I change plans mid-lecture half the time, or more commonly, come up with my lecture on the fly. I haven't bothered to prepare my notes for a while now. When I come up with a few examples first, it runs a little smoother I guess, but for the most part, you just have to make up numbers. If it doesn't work out, then they get some experience practicing with fractions. But anyway, planning everything in advance is not really where I need the most help. I come up with stuff just fine the morning of. Today I was a little nervous before class because I didn't know how I was going to fill nearly two hours with something for the students to do. Block days are usually pretty awful because I can't just rely on finishing the notes and getting them to spend the rest of the period practicing. But I did come up with something pretty good: a feedback quiz. They take a quiz (a no pressure, not graded quiz) and then I show the solutions up on the board. Pretty much everyone got them wrong. This is how my tests have always gone. I really haven't been giving them enough feedback in preparation for the tests. The tests used to be their first dose of reality and if you fail that, you're generally so bummed that you're disinclined to see what you got wrong or where you could change. This was really good for the students to assess themselves. It's ironic a little, because they can all check their answers in the back of the book or try the problems during the warm up and get feedback that way, but when I presented this in a different way, by creating a quiet testing environment, all of a sudden, everyone was listening and I heard startled gasps everywhere from people who thought they had it right and were off in some small way. Couldn't they have checked their work before? Couldn't they have asked if they had it right? Couldn't they come in after school for some extra help? The answer is yes to all of those things, but the reality is that they weren't.

The point of that anecdote was that slowly yet surely, I'm starting to try new ideas and refine things. Basically (to tie this all in to the title of the blog), I've built the pathways I needed to teach. It was an incredibly hard battle and very painful at times, but those pathways have been built. Now I'm at the stage where I have to refine. I have the framework and now it's just a matter of filling in the spots I need to fill in. This is why things have been so optimistic lately. Creating a framework is hard, hard stuff, but refining is really satisfying. You can see yourself improving and you finally have results. After the faux quiz today, students were happy. Some were sad that they'd gotten the answers wrong, but I put a real positive spin on it and told them that this meant they knew what they had to work on and wouldn't get it wrong on the test where it really counted. It was nice to see students leaving my classroom happy (and not just happy to leave).