Hi. Been ‘absent’ for a while. Been too busy just getting on with working and living, to document it. Also had a BIG whinge session at work with my managers…so had less need to voice it all, here.
I have been trying a new (to me) strategy of whole class-work, rather than individual work, and it certainly has the potential to make life easier for me at work. But it’s ‘early days’ for me – it doesn’t always work well.
I discussed my work hours, and decided to trial for a month, working 5 days a week for shorter hours, rather than 4 days a week for slightly longer hours. The first week, this worked well and I felt more balance in my life. But the second week, I did my usual trick of staying ‘just a little bit longer/just a little longer/just a little longer’ – every day - until it was late, again……and then still went in on the 5th day – so that week was a ‘failure’.
This is the 3rd week, and I am feeling torn between wanting to really give my new plan a good try – and at the same time, getting a bit panic stricken whenever I’m not completely on top of the paperwork, and so on.
I guess that, in order to give my plan a fair trial, I really do need to do only what I said I would: in other words, go home early and stick to the plan. For another 2 weeks, anyway.
At the moment I feel like I’d like to get a key to the building, so that I can go in there on the weekend, once or twice a month, when absolutely no-one is there and no distractions, to get completely caught up, on a Sunday, so that I can really focus just on my students’ needs, when I’m there during the week. The paperwork is really burdensome.
But also I am identifying some underlying issues with why I find the job so demanding and so frustrating. Of course it is also – at times – very rewarding and satisfying and certainly worthwhile. But I am inclined to focus on the negatives regarding my own performance, as I am such a perfectionist and always want to streamline things and make processes efficent, and so on…….
‘Systems Theory’ should have been my middle name………. it’s just a natural instinct.
So: regarding the systems we have going, where I work -
As is common in Literacy programs, we have a rolling intake, and inevitably every student (new or ‘old’) has different needs, so if you teach a class rather than individuals 1:1, what you teach will always be a compromise for most people. This is why I favoured individual work, but over time I found it very difficult to sustain – for obvious reasons. That’s why I’m trying out more classwork. It was inevitable.
I have quite a lot of good resources for teaching what I need to teach, but they are not yet organised completely in a way that makes it easy for me to immediately put my hand on everything I need. This re-organisation is a longterm project, which I have already put a lot of effort and time into – but which will still take a lot more effort and time to get it to an ideal point. After which, it will remain an ongoing task to keep it the system “user-friendly”.
I tend to like to have all my systems perfectly set up before I commence work on anything – just speaking in general about my life – so I hate the frustration of having to go ahead and work anyway, in this imperfectly organised work-world! But I just have to accept that.
My biggest problems are two:
1. The demands of the curriculum are so extremely detailed that it is almost impossible to ever be sure that you are really covering what you need to be covering, to ensure students obtain the results they deserve. This is because we teach 4 incremental levels of Certificate AND have to match every assessment to a second completely separate Reporting System, which does not directly align with the Certificate levels.
A lot of work could be done to make it much clearer exactly what needs to be covered in order to satisfy both. But no-one has time to do this work. I have made a beginning on it, because I need it. But being me, I would prefer to really get to grips with all that before I start trying to work with the system: it’s that same frustration again – of having to just get on and struggle with it, at the same time as trying to fully learn it and understand it.
2. The curricula are proudly described as ‘content-free’, meaning that it is specified WHAT the students must be able to do, at the end of their learning – but not HOW they should learn it, nor WHAT WITH. This is good, because someone who likes singing can learn to read by reading lyrics, someone who likes fishing can learn to read by reading about fish, someone who likes cartoons can learn to read by reading cartoons and so on… but it is also bad, because there are no supplied learning materials for the students.
That means that the teacher (me) needs to search out and supply most of the learning materials, because the students (by and large) lack the initiative or the discrimination, to select and remember to bring in their own materials (for example, to read). I think I am quite good at doing this, and I enjoy finding the right things for people, that will grab their interest – but it’s a lot to ask, even with only a small class (a dozen students). Inevitably, this is time-consuming: time that could otherwise be spent on actually teaching or supporting the learners -or on doing the paperwork!
It’s getting late. Enough. I am thinking on these things by way of trying to work out how to become more efficient, and less frustrated by my work.
3 Comments
6 May 2008 at 12:05 pm
My challenge with whole-class work and a continuous in-take was that I found I kept circling back to re-present introductory materials (so the newer, enthusiastic learners didn’t start out feeling lost). This meant I was offering a small amount of information several times, instead of a larger amount once.
I don’t know any solution to that, and in the end I cut back on the amount of whole-class activities. There are two areas I still find effective for whole-group learning. One involves reading (and writing / answering questions about) a book as a group, stronger readers scaffolding those who find it more difficult. The other involves current events (e.g., natural disasters or political stories) which provide an opportunity for whole-class learning.
Best wishes!
7 May 2008 at 10:11 am
Hi Wendell,
About “offering a small amount of information several times, instead of a larger amount once”: this isn’t a problem for my students as usually they don’t remember that they’ve ever done it before! Sometimes they even do ‘worse’ the second or third time around, than they did the first time!
My most effective whole-class activities have been those where we brainstormed ‘words we might need’ to write about ‘x’. (I write them up on the board to help with spelling.) Then they are asked to write something/anything about that subject – to write different amounts, according to their abilities.
I find the more able students are quite restrained, about not ’showing off’ and stealing the thunder of the less-able. But of course, this just means that they are exhibiting sensitivity, and their own time is basically being wasted. (Which is something I have a horror of doing: wasting anyone’s time.)
I find that my own students are often quite unaware of news stories… so we don’t talk a lot about those.
7 May 2008 at 12:11 pm
Actually, further to that, Wendell, it IS a problem re-presenting information, in that *I* forget WHO has done WHAT…so I can assume that groundwork has been done by someone, when in fact it hasn’t. That’s the main aspect of it that frustrates me.