Satiric news organization does it again!

You may remember when Congressman John Fleming of Louisiana took this article about Planned Parenthood a little too seriously and posted it on his Facebook page a couple of weeks back.

Well, it’s happened again. Hakim* is a news buff. He usually stays at his desk during our mid-class break and watches news reports (in both English and Arabic) on his phone. Yesterday, he showed me what he was watching (WARNING: If you are at work, if you’re with a small child or your grandmother, or if you are offended by crude language, you probably shouldn’t click on this link!). Yikes! I told him it wasn’t real, it’s a joke, it’s supposed to be funny, but I’m not sure he believed me. It’s not often that I wish my students had smaller vocabularies, but I really hope he doesn’t know what a slut is.

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.

“If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I’d like to do…”

The term is half over. In fact, the entire school is going on a ski trip tomorrow, so there are really only six classes left. It’s not a lot of time. This was a recurring theme at the mid-semester meeting last Friday. Agatha and I met with the other Intro teachers (speaking/listening, grammar, and writing) to discuss the students’ progress and strategize for the remainder of the term. Over and over I heard them say things like, “At this level, having class twice a week just isn’t enough. We need to see them every day.” “There is no way we can meet all of the objectives in this amount of time.” “We’ve barely even gotten to know the students and the term is already half over.” “If they’ve missed class even once, we’ve only seen them six or seven times ever. That’s more like tutoring!”

It’s looking like three students (of the group of eight) won’t be ready to move up to the next level at the end of the term. And the other five are questionable. Can any of them really “use the structures covered at this level in extended oral and written discourse with reasonable accuracy and some ability to self correct?" Probably not, if we’re being honest.

So, how do you help your students meet their learning outcomes when there just isn’t enough time? Cover everything and hope that they are (really) quick studies? Just focus on a few things? Assign more out-of-class work? Count on them getting a review in the next level? Hold them back for another term?

If only there were more time...

Things don’t always go as planned.

I’m a planner. Seriously. I find things like spreadsheets and calendaring and color-coding to be freakishly satisfying. Plans help me to get my thoughts organized, and allow me to feel prepared and confident standing up in front of a group of wily students. But…

Things change.
I had a writing activity planned for Thursday, but other things took longer than expected and I knew we couldn’t finish it in the eight remaining minutes of class. So I did something else.

Also, sometimes your plans to plan fall through.
Agatha and I usually take a few minutes after class to discuss what we’d like to cover in the next class and divide up who’s planning/leading what. We didn’t get to this on Thursday, then campus was closed on Friday because of a massive snow storm, then Agatha got sick over the weekend and didn’t come into work yesterday. There was no time to plan today’s class until about an hour before it this morning, so that’s what we did. We prepared bits and pieces asynchronously, then figured out how to make them flow together in the ten minutes before class started… Then Agatha remembered that a colleague would be observing during the second half of the class, so we completely rearranged things again three minutes before class. Then things took longer than expected, so we rearranged things on the spot throughout the class.

Lesson learned: Planning is nice, but not planning or not following the plan can be okay too.