March Blogpost - Laurie Smith - Routman (2003), Ch. 12: You Only Have So Much Time

I found this chapter very applicable to my life as a teacher.  Too often I feel as though there is never enough time to get done all of the things that are expected of us as teachers these days.  There is always something new being added to our “to do” list and it feels like we are losing important teaching time and taking our school work home to work overtime and get everything done that is expected.  Between all the assessments and data collection it is easy to feel bogged down.  This chapter helped me to see that not everything is as urgent as we make it.  Not everything has to be as hard as we sometimes make it.  Our teaching lives should be simple and more efficient by spending more time thinking.  Robin Woods stated:

“I am learning that good teaching doesn’t have to mean lots of hours.  Instead, it requires lots of thinking – thinking about what matters to kids, thinking about what kids need to know, and thinking about how they can be taken to the next level.  My husband will now see me spend less time at school or grading papers and hear me think aloud more about my students and how I’m approaching instruction.  I’d never really thought about how being a good teacher could mean having more time at home with my family.”

I never really considered that all the thinking I do about things I want to do in my classroom is actually a form of planning.  Does this also mean that all the time I spend perusing Pinterest for ideas for my classroom counts as planning?  I guess it does.  This is great news to me since I love Pinterest!   It is also important to keep work meaningful to our students, so that they will “happily engage in work that is connected to their lives and in projects in which they can see value.”  I like the idea of using every portion of our day, including transitions as teaching opportunities, keeping a quick pace when teaching to help hold our students attention to keep them engaged since their attention span is less than 10 minutes before they need a break.  I very much agree with the idea that our struggling students who get pulled for “skill and drill” programs are missing instruction that they need most and should never be pulled from read aloud and shared reading time.  Instead they should be pulled during science and social studies because language development is very important for our struggling students.  It is important that we, as teachers, “cultivate a love of learning.”  We should always evaluate how we are using our time and help our student develop a true love of learning by focusing on strengths.  I’m with Jim Popham in saying:

“If I were obliged to choose between students’ love of learning and their mastery of any collection of cognitive content standards, I’d choose the former every time.  Amen.”