Post for 11/29
Much of today was spent revisiting the relationship between strategy and activity so in trying to keep things different, upbeat, useful and exciting (!) I'll focus today on a brief mention we had about pacing. This problem came up in in my lesson last week and will likely come up again in the future so I think it's important to visit it a bit further. So what is pacing? In short, it's running against the clock, moving a lesson along and staying focused, conscientious and present all while directing, facilitating or having students discover whatever is necessary during a learning activity. Personally, I imagine pacing using one of my favorite football analyst malapropisms of "matriculating the ball down the field." While hilarious to me in the context of a football game, it actually makes a bit more sense in terms of pacing in the classroom. In short, pacing is something that is indelibly tied to preparation and even more so to experience.
When in the classroom I feel like I do a very good job hiding my internal concern over an experience deficit for this very reason. Every lesson I teach for several years (and likely throughout my career) will be a new one. Innumerable classes will be my guinea pigs for new lessons, objectives, concepts and ideas I have over the years. My feel for a classroom will get better but for now I'm concerned that my feel for the time it takes to introduce a concept, start an activity, have students complete a DoL and conclude a lesson will be consistently inadequate.
At the same time, I have an enormous amount of confidence in my ability to learn how to handle these sorts of problems over the next few months. With better strategy and more reps in front of a class, I'm sure I'll get a handle on it and develop a more accurate (to use another football term) internal clock while not rushing anything or missing opportunities for teachable moments.
This is slightly off topic but when I hear about teachable moments I always think about one of my favorite teachers I had in high school. I was a Junior in Fall 2001 and like every other Junior at my school I was enrolled in a Theology of Morality class (reminder: All Boys Catholic High School). Early in the school year things were quickly thrown off-kilter after the attacks on the World Trade Center. Throughout that day though, it was business as usual in most of my classes. We did our Physics work and read Crevecoeur in American Lit. Our guess was that it was a directive from our administration to avoid panic. But Morality was different. It was the only class I ever got to watch television in and wasn't excited to do so. The entire period our class was silent and our teacher didn't say a word either. It was definitely one of the weirdest but most appropriate classes I ever had. Much of that year was spent on St. Augustine, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr and the Cardinal Virtues but when the war drums started in the immediate aftermath we read Pacem in Terris and spent weeks talking about Just War and the consequences of violence. I always remembered that because every single one of us was incredibly sad, angry and confused but Mr. G stayed calm, kept us focused and asked us to look at the other end of our anger and the consequences of cavalierly entering wars. We were definitely off script in doing that so early in the year but the time called for it and discussions were intense. In fact, I know for a fact that they resonate with me and others from that class to this day. So while this doesn't relate to pacing directly, I feel like teachable moments sometimes take precedence.
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