Plan the Planny Plan*

Sitting by the pool, sipping an ice-cold lemonade. Enjoying the smell of suntan lotion mingled with chlorine. Ahhhh. Summer Vacation: one of the great benefits of teaching.

Or if you are like me, you are cleaning out your smelly basement of all the things your kids left behind when they moved out.  I thought all that stuff was going to go with them.  I am going to get to that pool one of these days, but my summer projects have a way of consuming my summer.

However you are choosing to spend your warm weather time, I hope you are mixing in a little bit of planning for the upcoming school year. Uggghhh. I know, this article is bumming many of you out and you feel you were duped into clicking on the “read more button”. But I am sincerely grateful you did click that button because Summer is a valuable time to take care of your “future self”.

The beginning of August is a great time to take an hour per day a couple days this week and just sit down with a cool beverage and your lesson plans.  Take a look at the entire school year while there are no tests to grade, no labs to prepare and your stress level is, hopefully, lower. (Although, I think something may have died in an old coal chute in the basement, so my stress level actually just spiked a bit. I chose to write this article so that I could bring it down a few notches)

I like to think that each year I am taking my classes on a journey. I am the tour guide and the only one who knows all the incredible things that I want to show them beginning in August and ending in May. I like to take time and look back through last year’s lesson plans and see what worked and what did not. I am getting older and cannot possibly remember each individual lesson, so I write myself notes throughout the year. I write about a new way I prepped a lab or an insightful comment a student made or a great question that was asked or if something really bombed.  I try to figure out what went wrong and then either try a different approach or totally scrap it. I used to begin my Chemistry class with an introductory lab where the students had to guess which would sink lower in water: diet soda or regular soda? Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?  I would have the students hypothesize about the possible outcomes. They had to reason their way through why they chose that particular hypothesis. I tried every permutation of this lab. I tried different can sizes, different water container sizes, and different brands of beverages. Nothing. This lab never made the visual impact I was hoping it would.  Two years ago, I finally took it out of my plans and replaced it with growing “magic rocks”.

It is not uncommon for my lab assistants to remark, “Hey!  You didn’t do that lab with us!” or “Why didn’t we study this last year?”  I always tell them that my courses are not etched in stone.  I am constantly trying to improve the way that I teach and the content that I deliver. Even though I have been teaching since we took notes by etching them in stone, I never want to get to the place where I am just resting on my laurels.

So, take a break from the pool, or in my case, from the endless list of projects and start planning your incredible journey.  Your excitement for the year will transfer over to your students and it will give you confidence that you know where you are heading.

*There is an old Dilbert comic where he was making fun of planning so much that you never got actual, physical work accomplished. One of the lines the boss told Dilbert was that he needed to “Plan the Planny Plan”.  It has been a catch phrase around our home ever since.