Don't Fear the Syllabus

My classes somehow get mapped out inside my head as I go for walks, work around the house or read novels. They usually sound pretty good up there. But it’s a joyless chore formalizing these ideas in a syllabus or a lesson plan.

And yet, it’s that time of year again -- probably my more conscientious and better organized colleagues are all done with this task. I’m putting it off to the last second.

Here’s how I make myself finally get to work on these things: I keep in mind that what will actually happen in class, day to day and minute to minute, bears little resemblance to the legalistic language of the syllabus and the standards-laden textspeak of weekly lesson plans.

Both are somewhat similar to the outlines my high-school English teachers made us write before we wrote essays: They gave you a direction to follow as you began the composing process. Unfortunately, back in the 19^th-century when I was in school, we were graded on how well our essay followed our outline. Preposterous!

I now think of the outline (and, by extension, the syllabus) in a different way. When I compose, I roughly map out the piece (omitting the Roman numerals, upper case letters, Arabic numerals, etc., because they remind me of high school) chiefly to keep me from freaking out from fear of the unknown as I write each paragraph. With a map, I don’t feel like this: “I know this paragraph is going pretty well, but I have no idea what I’m gonna write about next.”

So the syllabus can be useful in reminding me and trying to convince my students that this class is proceeding according to a plan and it isn't as completely random as it seems. Ditto for the lesson plans.

You and I will not be graded on how our syllabuses match up with our classes, and most schools will give us some leeway on the lesson plans.

When I was trying to keep my high-school essays from saying something I hadn't anticipated in the outline, even my little brain became frustrated, because it hadn't died at the moment of the outline’s creation. It had more interesting things it wanted to talk about!

In the syllabus and in the lesson plans, we project our good intentions. What happens in reality is usually better than that. More about the syllabus later, but for an expansive, moderately well-written discussion of it, see http://gladly-teach.blogspot.com/2011/08/final-first-impressions.html.

Pre-Plan: The Real and Not So Real

What are you supposed to do during Pre-Plan, that week of work for teachers before students return? And if the first week is Pre-Plan, when is just plain old "-plan"?

It turns out there are three versions of Pre-Plan week: One occurs in the ideal world, one in the real world and one in my world.

In the ideal world, Pre-Plan gives us time and space to get everything in order for the big day on which the State forces students to return to school. We can decorate our classroom, finish (or start and finish) our syllabuses, map out a few weeks of lesson plans, pick up supplies (a wonderful time that always makes me feel the State loves me and wants me to be happy), try to remember the difference between learning objectives and learning goals, get ready for the first couple of days of administrivia, and write all the necessary stuff on the boards.

In this version, teachers also attend a few, brief, informative faculty meetings to make sure we're all on the same page and that we continue to provide our students with the challenging, rigorous education they expect and deserve.

At the end of the ideal world's Pre-Plan, teachers go home to a restful, serene weekend, put their feet up, perhaps sip an adult beverage in moderation, watch episodes from a couple of seedy but nicely produced cable dramas, and look forward to a smooth beginning to another successful academic year.

In the real world, on the other hand, the meetings are a little longer and more numerous, and they focus chiefly on a torrent of new initiatives, policies, procedures, regulations, and points of emphasis (e.g., stricter dress code, a crackdown on cell-phone use, etc.) for the coming year. 

In some years, there have been long sessions on the district's new insurance plan, allowing an aging faculty to add to its already bulky stockpile of anxieties an awareness of its advancing mortality and the terrifying prospect of extended care.

These meetings also allow teachers to be anchored in one spot for long periods of time while they conduct an internal worry-fest over all the stuff they need to do back in their classrooms.

The real-world Pre-Plan does, however, allow some time for teachers to experience rare moments of solitude as they labor alone in their quiet chambers of learning, simultaneously trying to block out the frightening images from the insurance session while attempting to prioritize tasks for their few remaining hours (of Pre-Plan, not their lives).

Then there's the Pre-Plan week I experience.

First, I always show up on Monday, the "optional comp day." There are no meeting interruptions on that day, and there are always plenty of anxiety-easing chores. I know that the first few hours will be spent putting stuff back where I want it (everything gets rearranged a bit by the nice people who wax the floors over the summer).

One of Monday's treats is seeing previous students and meeting new ones as they drop by to get acquainted and find out what they'll need for next week. I thoroughly enjoy this and strongly recommend that new teachers try to show up for this nice little bit of banter.

By the end of the week, I  have transformed my classroom into what I hope will be a welcoming, comfortable environment -- one that has my personality or fingerprints on it -- for the soon-to-arrive students. I try to find a balance between the room as my place and the room as their place. For example, quotes on the wall should reflect my philosophy or values, but somewhere, somehow the room should also acknowledge that it's a temporary home for frequent youthful visitors.

I try to avoid the temptation to overdo the youth appeal of my room so it comes off looking like a mall video arcade combined with a Justin Beiber Fan Club meeting site. (I'm not sure they even like the Beibs, now turned enfant terrible, anymore.) Anyway, I'd rather my students not think I'm trying too hard to be cool, because, let's face it, I'm not, and you probably aren't, either.
  
Besides the whole ambiance thing, I put the finishing touches on my syllabuses (more about this in a future post), put together at least a week of lesson plans, and make absolutely sure I know what I want to happen on the first day of class (more on this later) and what my plans are for going over their assigned summer reading (assessment and discussion).

But truthfully, I never do nearly as much as I think I will during Pre-Plan because I bounce around my room like a pinball (ask your parents) and keep making unnecessary trips down to the mailroom and having longish conversations with colleagues about what they did over the summer and how little I did and trying to establish some sort of filing system that'll work better than the one I had last year and going through scraps of notes and old lesson plans in an effort to keep make-up work from being quiet as stress-provoking . . . well, you get the picture.

Then some years, when we're told the campus will be open on Saturday, I come back to make up for all the time I wasted during the week, but quickly begin to fret about how soon Monday a.m. will be here, and this causes me to lose focus, so then I try re-entering the room as if I'm a teenager to see the whole thing through their perspective, then I run through the first-day procedures and despair about the whole thing, then I head for the exit and look back once more at my room, knowing I'm forgetting something, flip the light off, then flip it back on, take one more look, then head home for an anxious remainder of the weekend, and while the cable-drama characters commit stylish acts of violence, I'm thinking chiefly of Monday, thinking "Is this any way to live?" And answering, yes, I love every second of it.

Welcome to high school, kids.