Back to Basics
I over planned my first two weeks at my new school.
You would think that over planning meant I was also over prepared, ready to handle anything they threw at me. In reality, though, it ended up being quite the opposite. It was only when I scaled WAAAAY the heck back that I was able to muster some sense of instructional stability again.
Some questions I asked (pretty obsessively) going into my new gig included:
- Will I have any other preps besides Spanish I?
- Will all of the students have 1:1 technology access? and
- Will I have my own classroom?
What I should have been asking was
- How many sections of that one prep will I be teaching at a time, and on what kind of time frame?
- When will all of the students have 1:1 technology access? and
- How many desks will I be expected to fit into my classroom?
Of course I knew I was going to be in for a shock meeting 90+ new kids for the first time after “cheating” for years. I knew I was going to need to buy time to get a feel for that many kids and what kind of project would really whet their appetites. But it was a much bigger shock to find out it was more like 180 kids I had to feel out, and in six sections of my one prep on an A Day / B Day schedule all year.
Even having braced myself for that jump, I found my brilliant plans for card talks and song surveys to get to know my new clientele almost completely thwarted by the physical reality of my room and the fact that student Chromebooks would not be completely distributed until halfway through the second week of classes.
My strategies for speedy feedback swiftly disintegrated before my eyes. The One-Word Image stories that my students cherished last year sputtered. The Señor Wooly and Adobe Spark and Actively Learn activities that I had so carefully scaffolded were obviously out the window. Even the stations I set up in the hopes of getting some face time with each kid directly only made me a cranky, out-of-control, screaming, stomping crone.
It was very tiring, and it was very ugly.
All I wanted was to know everything about my kids and have them know exactly what I expected of them all at once. Is that so much to ask?
Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up.
So instead of scheming further machinations just to keep kids busy, I vowed to take it back to kindergarten. I swore I’d walk those classes of 35, 36, 27, TEN (who knows what’s up with that)–through exactly what I expected each day.
See, all of the promises and proficiency babies and AAPPL bites that made me–and, I daresay, my students–so comfortable before…they had no context here. They were answers to questions these kids weren’t even interested in asking.
Not yet anyway. How could they care about what we were leading up to if they were confused about what we were doing that day??
So I changed two major things in my last day before the Hurricane Florence shutdown shortened our week:
- I designed a series of comprehensible questions about what to expect each day and
- I brought back David Bisbal, coining my new go-to motivational phrase: Participar o bailar.
You see, while my huge classes on B Days are pretty hyper, my first period A Days is SO SLEEPY. Now I hadn’t dusted off “Te mueves tú” in three years, but I was desperate to get them engaged, so every time they seemed too sleepy to participate, it was time for another round of David Bisbal’s choreography.
Well.
It turns out that a little mandatory participation can go a long way. I found myself putting on my old exaggerated teacher act, asking enthusiastically ¿¿Vamos a bailar?? as I feinted toward the computer to restart by old standby singalong. THEN everybody had something to say!
Man, I could get EVERYONE saying “SIIIII” and “NOOOO” to questions from “¿Hoy es martes?” to “¿La clase tiene notas hoy?” just with a quick, assertive “¿Participar o bailar?” I almost didn’t have to make a single angry tick mark while I silently waited for the class to get quiet. I didn’t even have to go past tres in the hastily invented tres-dos-uno-SILENCIO prompt that I enacted after my usual pop song call & response failed to stick!
What’s more, everybody knew exactly what they had to do by the end of class, I got to make sure everybody was with me and got a good eyeful of the dashboard they were supposed to check when they came in every morning.
Plus, we got to dance and be a little silly.
And when you think about it, isn’t that even more fundamental than any proficiency standards or procedures?
