I'm Dizzy and Cross-Eyed from a Saturday Spent Getting Ahead...My Lack of Planning Cannot Constitute My Own Emergency

I live for having opportunities in K-12 schools and with the work of kids. This week, I have two full-days in a high school from 8 a.m. to 2 pm, and they just so happened to be on two of the days I have classes until late in the evening. On Monday, I have two doctor's appointments followed by my Monday course, and Thursday is meeting, followed by meeting, followed by meeting followed by meeting, all the way until 7 p.m..

Knowing myself, I had to think ahead. How can I be ready for teaching at night if I don't have the opportunity to plan during the day. Coupled with this is Karal, who I hate leaving home at all, so I need to factor coming home in-between to let her out and keep her less panicked than usual. 

What does this mean? I spent all day yesterday working through plans for Tuesday and Wednesday night, so I can roll onto campus and to my thing, and then roll back home. I would be absolutely panicked if I didn't have goals, purposes, print-outs, and an agenda for the students, especially as this is a particularly important night of lessons.

Because I'm covering courses for colleagues, I'm am being indoctrinated with the land of EdTPA hell. For those that don't know, it is Pearson's money-making scheme to assess pre-service teachers on their lesson plans and although parts are familiar to lesson planning as I learned it in the past, it is also repetitive, wonky, and simply silly. So many of us are finding ourselves 'teaching to the test' on a college campus. There is no joy in any of it and it is not the kind of instruction I like to do.

Alas, it's also important to model what you're asking for, so this week's lessons need to be metacognitive of the thinking behind the lessons, so as I have the entire evenings planned out, I also chose to model the entire evening in a EdTPA lesson plan template...which meant double the work. This is my strategy for killing multiple birds with one stone. 

College professors who don't prepare teachers, you are allowed to feel fortunate that you don't need to bow to the shrine of Pearson, as K-12 teachers do, as well as those preparing teachers. I suppose it's equivalent to write a plan for a surgery, every step/every mishap/every needed fact and strategy and have that typed out for a board before you do the surgery, so they can judge your surgery by the paper content, and not the actual surgery. 

And what's my lesson on teaching a lesson for an elementary text...well, we're reading Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, so we'll be going towards the Gods of Olympus. Of course, I can add to the frenzy by stating many of us in my department are also being told, "As you do this, you also need to justify your jobs and build your programs so that your work is viable to the University at a time when teachers are leaving the profession and very few are entering it."

You can't make any of it up. Just when you think the work is impossible, powers that be make it even more impossible.

That is what it means to be an educator.