Time management

I think it would be a nice time to explore time management in the classroom, as my Spring semester begins to wind down and everything in college starts to become compressed. As stated before, I will have difficulty as a new teacher someday working on time management, because as we know, in college I have no sense of the word. To give my audience a brief overview of what is on my plate right now in college, I have 16 lecture hours per week, in addition to 2 hours at the middle school and 24 hours of work at the go-kart track Friday through Sunday. I have a diversity essay to write for my education class, one more ten page essay for my theory class, one more essay for my zen and the literary experience class, a short story and four more poems for my creative writing class, a writing journal for my creative writing class, two more novels to read for my theory class, three more books to read for my zen class, the Praxis I exam to take, a tech competency exam to take, this blog to finish up, a roundtable discussion to prepare for in my education class, and sometime after all of this is finished, I'm planning to write up a poetry lesson for my middle school class in May once college has let out. One wonders where the time for all of this comes from (And by the way, I didn't even bother to mention the critical essays I'm suppose to be reading for both my education and theory class). For me, the solution is simple -- stop eating, stop sleeping, and do your work. Such is the life of an academic scholar: a life of seclusion.

Back to the concept of time management in a classroom. There are inevitables I mentioned in my practice of pedagogy entry. For example, in my classroom I am working in, there is a phone that the office uses to call up to the classroom. The phone rang five times in the span of two hours, and each time the phone rang, my teacher had to drop the instruction she was giving to answer the phone. No wonder students are having difficulties learning, when the phone in the classroom won't stop ringing. In fact, at 8:49am, when the phone rang again, my teacher said "And you wonder why some kids don't learn. This is crazy." In addition to the phone, another teacher came up to the classroom to take one of the students away, which was another distraction that my teacher had no control over. When my teacher was going through testing material, she was rather quick and on the spot. I noticed that during their spelling test, for example, she spent about 30 seconds between giving each word. She also walked around the room and corrected the spelling tests while students worked on the next assignment, both providing immediate feedback and helping the pace of the lesson move along.

At 8:54am, when my teacher started the audio tape of a story for students to listen to, she said to me "I didn't do a very good job there of time management." I don't think it is necessarily her fault when distractions start making their way into the classroom. First of all, the place where she spent most of her time was on the creation of a position statement (I call it a thesis). It is the most crucial piece of a paper, if the thesis is weak, then the metaphorical cookie of your paper crumbles. When she noticed students were having difficulty with the position statement portion of the lesson, she spent more time on it.

Why would the curriculum spend so little time on the thesis and move on to the next lesson? For Gods sake, its the most important part of the paper. Once the introduction and thesis are written, you have only to follow the thread of the thesis to write the rest of the piece. In fact, once a solid thesis is established, the body of the paper practically writes itself. Lets look at the thesis statement from my critical essay I recently wrote and published on this blog: "There is a civil war being fought in the field of pedagogy with high risks at stake, between competing discourses and whichever discourse rises up out of this conflict victoriously will have the power to decide what is, and what is not a 'legitimate' education for the youth of this nation." Once I have that thesis written, I know my argument for the whole paper is going to surround around competing discourses in the field of pedagogy. I follow the thread of the thesis, first defining discourse for my audience and then moving forward, support the notion of politically driven discourses that are vying for the power to control the curriculum. I also make it clear in my paper that by "high risk causalities," I mean the students who are being left out while all of the conflicts continue on. I even split the term civil war in my conclusion, noting in my conclusion that "constructive conflict can be civil; it does not have to be a war."

All being said, I wonder sometimes if the writers of these lessons themselves have any sense of time management. Certainly, some concepts deserve more time than others.