True and Scary Lesson Plan Meme

lessonplansomee-cardsSaved from the clever Someecards site.

I won’t add much to this, except I now know teachers who are spending the bulk of their week-ends preparing lesson plans. NOT LESSONS — but lesson plans, those sheets that tell what the teacher intends to do in class, and why and when, based upon what state or national standards, including plans for differentiation for learners of all different levels. Teachers today frequently borrow or buy lessons from the internet since they have no time left after writing lesson plans and fulfilling data requirements to actually make a lesson. The five to ten pages of lesson plans that must be submitted to administration usurp the time that might have been used to craft a fun lesson.

The plans are not optional. I recently talked to an administrator who was forced to tell teachers as part of Staff Appreciation Day that, if those multi-page, preformatted, canned lesson plans came in late, teachers were going to be penalized. They would be obliged to give up their lunches or time before or after school until the lesson plans were completed to some higher administrator’s satisfaction. I can imagine how well that particular piece of staff appreciation went over.

Less than a decade ago, I customarily handed in one or two pages total for my middle school classes, showing the topics and standards I intended to address. Somehow, the classes were exposed to all the standards and content that today’s students receive, but I also had time to create the Martian backpack project, the Martian calendar project, and short-story assignments with zombies and other fantastic creatures, as well as the usual little brothers and bicycles. My projects had roles and rubrics. We did fine without my writing a book covering every detail of my intentions in advance.

Eduhonesty: When teachers are writing ten pages worth of work on what they plan to do during an upcoming week, showing exactly how that plan matches the Common Core or local standards, they cannot be cutting paper strips and preparing other props for a fractions’ activity. They cannot be gathering microscopes, and setting up red onions and slides so students can learn how to create, view and describe onion cell slides. At worst, today’s ridiculous lesson plans steal time directly from preparing student instruction, shutting down experiments and activities when not enough time remains to actually pick up onions from the store.

It’s as if we spent the afternoon writing down recipes for veggie fried rice and Moo shu pork, until we were so desperate for time that our only choice was to race to Yee’s Chinese Restaurant for take-out, and then cross our fingers that Mr. Yee makes a Moo shu pork which at least resembles what we intended to serve.