Teaching is a Messy Endeavor

Being a teacher is a lot different than most people think it is. 

I think most people imagine a nice, orderly process: 

• The teacher lectures;
• The students read aloud from the book in class; 
• There is homework; 
• Then a quiz and;
• Then, at some regular intervals, unit or chapter tests. 

All nice and neat and orderly.

Here’s how it really goes for me in the real world: 

• Peggy doesn’t turn in her homework regularly so it’s difficult to see if she’s really understanding the work and can do it on her own;
• Amy always says she understands but really doesn’t so you have to figure out when she’s telling you the truth or just saying she understands so she doesn’t have to admit she’s completely lost;
• Johnny is out of school on the day of the quiz so he has to make it up during recess or after school;
• There is a change in the schedule so the review day you’d planned gets pushed off to the next day, thereby pushing off the quiz to the day after that and pushing the start of a new section to the following week.

Furthermore, within any class studying any topic there will be students who are more or less advanced than their peers. It’s a little like herding cats. They are all over the place academically but somehow I’ve got to get them to the end of the section at more-or-less the same time.

I don’t have a homogeneous group of students studying 6th grade math, I have eight individuals studying 6th grade math. They’re all different and they all need to be focused on individually.

Like I said...it’s a mess but it’s the only way it gets done.