Small Strokes Big Oaks

Today, the harbinger of the end of summer arrived in my mailbox: the back-to-school packet, complete with my parking pass, my institute day schedule, a few announcements, and what every teacher rips open the envelope to see immediately: my schedule for the year.  It wasn’t any different than what I’d expected; I’ll have five classes of English 2 this year which is a combination of speech and English literature/language.  It’s a really fun class with a great curriculum: we get to give really fun and funny speeches, study persuasive rhetoric in many forms (my favorite are the commercials!), read great books like Anthem by Ayn Rand, drama like A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, and nonfiction like excerpts from Stiff by Mary Roach.

Teaching five of the same classes all day can have it’s benefits and drawbacks.  On one hand, I’ll have lots of time to reflect on what happened earlier in the day and improve it for my later classes while also being able to easier plan ahead.  I’ll also only have to plan for one class every day rather than two or three, freeing up some time for better grading and responding to student work.  On the other hand, though, when I collect a set of papers, I’ll be collecting five classes worth which, if you figure I have 25 students per class, makes 125 papers.  Also, teaching the same thing five times in a row can get, well, repetitive.  Luckily, I’ve devised a way to retain the ability to reflect on and improve my lessons for later classes and keep the same amount of free time while splitting up the paper load and the repetitiveness!

I’ve decided that, this year, I will stagger my curriculum.  For example, in quarter two, there are two major units I have to cover: the informative speech with research and the novel.  So, instead of having all of my classes complete the informative speech at the same time then move on to the novel, I’ll have three of my classes complete the informative speech while two are working on the novel at the beginning of the quarter, and then switch for the latter part of the quarter.  This allows me to break up my day and the grading load while still covering the curriculum.  I’ll also still be able to immediately reflect upon and improve my lessons because I’ll be able to take what I learned from the first part of the quarter and apply it to my other classes during the next part of the quarter.

Switching it up like this will benefit the students and me.  They’ll get some lessons that have the benefit of what would normally be a year’s worth of experience; normally you have to wait a whole year to try a lesson again, but I’ll only have to wait four weeks!  I’ll get to try out new things in my lessons and refine them quicker and make even better revisions for later years in which I might be fortunate enough to teach English 2 again.  I’ll also be able to stagger the grading load and planning while still, effectively, only prepping for one class – I’ll use basically the same lessons during the second half of the quarter for one set of classes that I did during the first part of the quarter for the other set of classes, just tweaked a bit for effectiveness.

This is just one way to work with teaching multiple sets of the same class.  I’ve never tried it before, but I’m willing to give it a shot for at least the first quarter and see how it goes.  How do you teach multiple sets of the same class?  I’d love some ideas!