Mountain climbing, but of a different sort

I’ve recently been climbing mountains. These aren’t the usual windswept rocky ones, but rather paper-based ones that I can do in the comfort of my living room sat at my PC. It’s just amazing at the amount of paperwork someone training to be an IT teacher churns out in a week. I’m teaching IT - computers… why do I need so much paper?

Well, first there’s the lesson plans. They need printing out so I can put them in my training file as evidence that I do really plan lessons. Then there’s all the evaluations I’m supposed to do… supposed… and the evaluations of me, written by other people. And don’t forget the worksheets for the kids - if I have 32 kids in a class, that’s 32 pieces of paper.

Quite a lot can be re-used though with some thought. I’ve found that teaching my classes how to fill in worksheets on their computers reduces a lot of photocopying and paper shuffling. Anything they need to read, but not write on only needs printing for one class and then re-using. If OpenOffice had the same “book-fold” layout as Word does, it’d be the best thing ever.

In addition to all this teacher stuff, I have the university side to do as well. I have a course to pass, which means writing assignments and filling in sheets to say I have done things. This is currently two files and growing. These assignments aren’t short - the last one I did came to 75 pages, the one before that was something like 30 pages long and I have two more. I’ll be glad when I’ve finished the course, half the paperwork will go away.

Lesson plans are a curious thing. As trainee teachers, we have to write them in full down to the last detail. The reasoning is that by doing so the trainee will be forced to consider every small part of their lesson. Want to hand out the kids’ books to write in? That takes time, there’s mechanics involved in getting everyone sat down and their computers working. Shutting the beggers up takes minutes sometimes, depending on the weather and what they had last lesson. By writing all this down as meticulously as NASA plans an astronaut’s trip to the toilet things go smoothly. Fail to do this planning and it all goes badly wrong. There’s a point to it.

However, after a few months of doing this, half of it becomes automatic and you naturally allow “faff” time for the kids to decide what colour text they want to use in their Powerpoint slideshow. Lesson planning goes from minute detail to an overall “they’re going to do X, Y and maybe Z”. It’s a bit like programming - work out what the program should do, and the method of doing that becomes quite easy to work out. My lesson plan really could be “kids do quiz for ten minutes, we go through the answers for five. Kids spend half an hour doing worksheet 1, then twenty minutes on worksheet 2. Good kids then do worksheet 3, or we end the lesson by doing a crossword”. Two lines of text for an hour’s work, but no I have to write it all out, listing how many computers I need and what they are going to learn this lesson.

To avoid drowning in this workload - it’s not just one lesson, it’s four a day and if it takes an hour to plan one lesson you’re going to die - there is great benefit in scrawling out the basic idea for a whole string of lessons (the week is a good start) and then at another time typing this out properly with worksheets and sample files. Doing any of this the night before isn’t pleasant - teaching for six hours a day and then spending three hours planning at home is a good way to go mental.

Time management is the key. Know what you’re doing next week, don’t live for the next five minutes.

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Tags: Teaching, University, Work