If there is one thing that I have taken away from my limited student teaching experiences thus far, it is how much more you begin to value your time.How teachers spend their time each day is very important. The teaching profession demands many of those oh-so-precious hours each day. It starts with the instruction, which in my case will be four and a half hours a day. For every hour of teaching in the classroom there are numerous hours of work that go into supporting it. Not having taught a full load yet I cannot accurately guess how many additional hours go into supporting one hour of actual instruction. I think a conservative guess is three. Now that I have been doing the teacher routine for a few days I understand in a whole new light why my cooperating teacher is constantly muttering, "If we only had more time."
Time is also important when looking at instruction over the course of a school semester or year. I look at all the material we have to cover for state standards and wonder how it will fit into approximately 180 days. That does not even include all the other information I want to share with my students. This issue of coverage is particularly astute for history classes. I cannot think of another subject where new potential material is created as each day moves from the present into the past. Ten years ago history classes did not need to talk about 9-11 or the genocide in Darfur because those events had not happened yet. Now history classes are expected to discuss those items in addition to all the historical events they taught before, while the time frame in which to teach it remains constant. What it means is that things get cut from the curriculum or items get just a passing mention. Just the other day I lamented to a co-worker that the three greatest classical composers collectively got three minutes of time in a world history class. There is just not enough time for both depth and breadth of coverage in the classroom.
The issues surrounding time appear overwhelming, but there is hope. All I need to do is look at the example set by the teachers around me every day. They manage to find a way to fit it all in so they must be doing something right. I need to study what they do and learn from their example to find their secrets, their tricks, and their time saving tactics. They have learned to make the most out of a teacher's most precious commodity, time.
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Tom,
ReplyDeleteI completely understand your point here. While teaching 6th grade History, which in my case is Early American History, I actually have a cap at Reconstruction. We will not be teaching anything more after that because it is outside of the curriculum.
My CT likes to give my students in depth knowledge. For example, we spent three days on the Lewis & Clark Expedition alone (which in our case is equal to three hours of instruction time). Although I loved that we taught such in depth knowledge, some of our students never got to fully learn the vocabulary. Others cannot write a paragraph or even a complete sentence. Nor can they tell a complete sentence from an incomplete sentence.
At the middle school level, we juggle trying to teach in depth knowledge with numerous important skills! Sometimes I wonder if we should have limited Lewis & Clark and used the time to work on in-depth writing skills or learning how to pick important information from a paragraph.