liner notes from the smallest violen in the world's recording of "lesson plan blues"

from an e-mail to prof. barry o'connell:

we're two days and an eternity into our hell week of lesson critiques. we plan and teach a lesson every day for 8 days, and teach two lessons on one of those days. we're being observed and commented on by a group of hand-picked veteran teachers. by its nature, the process is grueling - but seems to be approximating school year routines (or at least school year stress levels) fairly well. also, the teachers who are observing us are giving excellent feedback. unfortunately, some of my colleagues are a little too used to grade inflation, and seem resistant to the fact that we're recieving the occasional - and mostly justified - C (and lower). i'm operating under the impression that i'm a functional teacher, but in no way harbor the notion that i'm consistently proficient in all the instruction areas i need to cover. furthermore, while i lean towards the romance of the "natural teacher," it's increasingly clear that there is a fair amount of substance within the curricular education training approach. that being said, it's nice to be taken to task in those pockets of instruction left uncovered by my youthful charm. at times, however, there seems to be an inconsistency in both the structure of our training last month as it relates to our assessment this week, as well as the strictness and interpretive flexibility of our observers as they grade us with the given rubric. yet, this itself is a teachable episode - the communication flaws of administration, the philisophical discrepancies of a faculty, and the manifold tug-of-war between relevance, application, communication, production, and consumption. problems and meta-problems in the desk and at the chalkboard (or, more appropriately and less poetically, the dry-erase board).

**

so that's that. a system of not wholly unjustified frustration in most/all cases. there's plenty that could have been done last month to prevent what seems to be a huge case of people not being on the same page, and people feeling like they've been instructed contrary things, or being held responsible for things they were un- or underprepared for. this high-pressure assessment environment should have been more present during the summer school session - where many teacher corps members were given carte blance in their classrooms, and few if any of us recieved even the least sort of active instruction/real assessment on anything beyond classroom management (which is, agreeably, something we all need to learn). the irony of this last point is that many of us have no performed comfortability with the concept of assessing our students during lesson plans (i, most certainly, am in this set of people); we were modeled a situation of little/no accountability, and most of us developed a teaching routine in a sink-or-swim environment of little beyond peer support. this, again, is a strangely ironic and mete-pedagogical problem - perhaps structurally similar to those failures in the public schools system that we are trying to address. to take this a bit further - classroom management is more than just the ability to manage/manipulate students as socio-behavioral individuals, it is also to manage/manipulate them as thinking individuals.

unfortunately, i feel like i'm at quite a loss of structured preparation to deal with this latter element of classroom management - and i'm being called to task on it in a way that is rather unexpected. nevertheless, this is worthwhile. though my "grade" suffered today (and i'm at no end of intolerance with people whose frustrations are scoped mainly within their concerns about their graduate school gpa, or their feeling that the basic case of either being in a graduate program or being in a public university in the south implies generous grade inflation in favor of their previous insitution; to this latter set of conditions, i'd like to offer a reminder that the teacher corps is a graduate program in name only, and that its an alternate route teaching program - by definition we've never had substantial curricular exposure to teaching, or teaching instruction), i have tangible, understandable holes in my instructional strategies, and i intend to fix them. contrary to the response that 2+ hours of lesson planning were all for naught, and that i'd have no idea what i'd have to do if that weren't enough - i think the eventual response to my shortcomings will be a realization that i'm doing too much work in the wrong areas of planning. i'm going to have to plan a steady stream of 50 minute lessons every week for at least two years - i'd venture a guess that the response to most of mine and my colleagues needs is one of focus and economy. however, i do believe that perhaps we were never given any real instruction on how this economy might be developed, that our time in the month of july was not managed properly/efficiently (indeed, perhaps in ways similar to how my lesson was not managed well today), that this high-pressure environment may be creating plenty of avoidable stress, but - at the end of the day - i'll hit august with at least some of the screws tightened. at the very least, i'll have been given an opportunity to work with peers and veterans to decide on which screws are loose, or at least be reminded of them.