I have had an excellent day. This really surprised me because I had
made plans to work in my yard all day today. As I was getting ready to
go out, I got a call from my nephew asking me to watch his daughter for a
few hours. This sounds fine, just take the child outside with you
right? Not so much. She is eleven months old, with blond hair and blue
eyes. You just can't take her outside to crawl around. So, quick
change of plans, we decided to stay inside and clean the house and
play. We did go outside and grill our lunch and eat it at the picnic
table. We didn't get a lot done, it was just a pleasant day.
This
kind of thing happens in the classroom too. Your moving right along,
and all of a sudden the student's can't do their research because the
network is down, There is a fire drill and it takes 20 minutes to find
the kid that went missing (from the room next door, not yours), your
kids just aren't "getting it", it could be any number of things that
make change necessary. As a teacher, we always have to be ready to
throw away the lesson plans and create a new plan on the fly. This
isn't always easy, but good planning makes it easier. It is smart to
always have a contingency plan for technology failures. This can be
especially difficult for me, as I am a digital media teacher, but I have
been know to hold impromptu poetry slams, as well as creating vocab
word books. Sometimes backing up and reteaching is difficult to
stomach. No one likes to admit that they didn't do a perfect job, but
we have to remember that the most important part of the job is to make
sure our students learn, not to stand up and deliver the "perfect
lesson". So today I learned that its better to relax and go with the
flow, rather than get angry about plans that were changed on the fly.
