Nov

6

Emergency Lesson Plans Are A Great Idea

Filed Under Dealing With Stress, Organization, The Way I See It | 5 Comments

Emergency lesson plans are a great idea. They’ve made my life so much easier on many occasions. I create a few lesson plans to use when there is an emergency- if I’m away from school, if I’m at school but not well and can’t think, if my originally planned lesson just doesn’t work etc. Basically these lessons are there for me to use when things aren’t going well. I usually use www.edhelper.com to create the lessons and then I print a class set and keep them in a file in my drawer labeled emergency lesson plans. There are lots and lots of activities on edhelper that you can use to fill in for those times when the wheels fall off the teaching wagon. I usually include a reading activity with questions and a word search for vocabulary and some other activity. There are reading activities for math and science as well as English, history etc. It’s amazing what’s available. With a little imagination and foresight you can be prepared for those days when nothing seems to go well- like today. :)

Nov

1

Thank You, Jeff

Filed Under Organization, The Way I See It | Leave a Comment

I was reminded again today that teachers are some of the most generous people I know. A teacher’s day is extremely busy teaching classes, covering classes for teachers who are away, marking, giving extra help to students during lunch or after school, supervising students during lunch and after school, attending meetings of one sort or another, completing paper work( the bain of a teachers existence) etc. Some days it never ends. Usually, it’s difficult to find a quiet moment to have a cup of tea and bit of lunch. So when I went to the science department to get the materials I needed for tomorrow’s class, I hoped I’d find someone there who was free to show me where the materials were stored.

I knocked on the science office door and Jeff, one of the science teachers, invited me in. I told him I wanted my students to build electric circuits tomorrow and could he please show me where I could find the materials I needed . Jeff was so generous with his time and experience. Despite the fact that I was interrupting his lunch, he not only showed me where the supplies were stored, but he also showed me the best way to set things up so that the activity would go smoothly. I really appreciated this. He didn’t have to go to all that trouble. He could have simply shown me where the materials were stored. That’s all I expected him to do. Instead, he gave up a lot of his valuable lunch time to help me. Even though I’ve been teaching for forever, I don’t have a lot of experience teaching science and need all the help I can get. After he showed me the ropes, so to speak, I felt much more confident about the whole thing. Thanks, Jeff.

You can tell that Jeff enjoys teaching. Over the years, his students have told me that Mr. Salt knows his stuff and can explain things so that you can really understand them. They tell me that if they don’t understand something , Mr. Salt will explain it another way so that they can get it. He doesn’t just tell them the same thing over again, only louder. And, that’s a good thing.

Aug

29

Twenty-five Cents for a Pencil! I’ll Bring My Own!

Filed Under Organization | 5 Comments

I’m still chuckling when I think about what he said that day in class. A while ago, I got fed up with my students coming to class unprepared- no paper, no pencils, no books etc. (What else is new?) Usually, I’ll lend my students something if they give me collateral- a MP3 player for a pencil, a watch for a calculator etc. One day, I got fed up with taking care of all the collateral I had collected in my desk drawer. Often, the students would forget their collateral and leave my classroom with my pencil or whatever. I didn’t want the responsibility of taking care of their watches, MP# players, cell phones etc. Things “disappeared” from my classroom. So the next time a student came up to my desk to borrow a pencil, I told him and the rest of the class that I would no longer be lending pencils. I would be happy to sell them a pencil for twenty-five cents and donate the proceeds to charity at the end of the semester. Well, he was indigent. “Twenty-five cents,” he said, “I’m not going to pay twenty-five cents for a pencil. I’ll bring my own pencil from now on.” And, he did.

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