Success

Depending on how you look at it, I’ve had a tremendously successful day.

That’s not to say that M didn’t bemoan my computer-glazed look every time she passed, or that N spent none of the day clinging to my chair looking imploringly up at me while I neglected her diaper. But at least I was having a pretty good (at least okay) time–and completed preparations for a “persuasive techniques” unit that’s going to be a lot of fun.

Looking at sample magazine ads, Super Bowl commercials, and presidential campaign ads isn’t everyday fare for my English students. Indeed, this unit is part of a broader paradigm shift for me, one born out of necessity, since I’ve already taught basically everything there is to teach in seventh grade English, and the school year is only one ninth of the way through.

My new tactic is that instead of teaching English–a rather boring thing, when you think of it–I’m going to teach whatever strikes me as interesting. Of course, in the process of learning about whatever, I’ll make sure that important literary concepts are being absorbed by my little childers. In this unit, for example, aside from comprehensively and captivatingly covering all elements of one entire state standard, students are also going to read a nonfiction article about campaign ads and read the newspaper while they clip examples of facts and opinions.

I think it’s a great new approach, except that I refuse to commit my every Saturday to spewing forth tremendous lesson plans.

To make myself feel a little better about today’s endeavor, I did some math: I spent probably 8 hours preparing what will perhaps take a total of three hours to teach. Since I’ll teach it to all three of my classes, I’ve now prepared for 9 hours of class time. I’ll probably end up with a few hours of grading the resulting work produced by students, which means that all told, this unit will have sapped over 10 hours of my personal time in exchange for only 9 hours of classroom time.

Now, this seemed a horridly depressing preparation-teaching time ratio, until I considered that I have 58 students. This means that my 10+ hours of personal time will become a total of 174 hours of student work time.

And that doesn’t sound too bad.