Time. I love it when I have it. I hate it when I don’t have enough of it. And education is one of the most time bound activities humans participate in.
"They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself," according to Andy Warhol.
I found myself contemplating time as I did my lesson plans this past weekend. This is the part of the year when teachers (and principals and assistant superintendents and etc.) begin thinking about what kids have been taught so far this year in the classroom and comparing it to what they were SUPPOSED to have been taught by now. Most school systems have some type of a planning document that teachers get at the beginning of the year telling them what to teach when. My school system calls it a pacing guide. We have them for reading language arts and for math, but not for other content areas.
Benjamin Franklin once said that lost time is never found again.
For a while I had a rhythm going in reading. I could plan in one week chunks and that worked well. Mondays we worked from a writing prompt to see if students could use the essential skill they'd learned last week. Tuesdays we'd have the week's skill lesson and cover vocabulary for the story we were going to read. Wednesdays we'd follow along in the book while the story was played on a tape. Thursdays we'd usually have to finish the story, then we'd follow up with some comprehension exercises. Fridays we'd have assessment of some kind (and usually a spelling test). If snow or some school event took a day, I could usually cope...
"We must use time as a tool, not as a crutch," said John F. Kennedy.
In early February snow finally took two days in one week. And the next week snow took a day and the fourth grade state writing assessment took a day. And the next week benchmark testing took two days. And my rhythm was gone. Too much time had been stolen from class and the one instruction cycle per week thing that I had going died. Probably I'll get it back soon. We'll see.
Evita Peron once said "Time is my enemy." But she had different reasons for feeling that way, I suppose, than I do.
When I get my kids they know less than their peers. They are with me because something makes it harder for them to learn. I'm supposed to find some way not just to keep up, but to catch up. For the success stories, that happens. For most, it doesn't.
The temptation is to wait until Monday. Let's play an extra game - tic tac toe with reading rods, maybe. Have fun, kill time, do something vaguely related to the content standards and the pacing guide, and jump back into rhythm on Monday. That's the temptation.
John F. Kennedy is supposed to have told the story of the great French Marshall Lyautey asking his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, "In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!" Kennedy told the story at the University of California, Berkeley, on March 23, 1962.
My kids don't have enough time to just kill time. And I'm not resigned yet to the idea that they just WON'T catch up. They may take longer to mature; but all the more reason to start today. Killing time is a bad solution, especially since the problem is that there already is not enough of it.
"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." - Henry Thoreau
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