I'd forgotten about this, but last semester we were all asked/told to submit a four page teaching plan for an example class by the end of the week for review by a professor in the Department. In hindsight, some of may have been a bit snotty about having to do it: at the time, our pay was about a week late, again, and nobody ever, ever writes a four page plan for a class.
Still, the day before the deadline, I'm bashing out a crushingly detailed teaching plan for what would have sounded like quite a good class, had we not been instructed to write the thing to death over four pages. Despite being about jobs and interviews, and having the same activities I had actually run in the class, the plan bore little resemblance to the engaging and fun two-hour lesson I had taught on this topic five times before. Oh well. Send. Forget. Go to see if we've been paid yet.
I come back from Vietnam and, on Lin's desk, my teaching plan is waiting for me. With annotations, corrections to be made "Uh oh," I think, or words to that effect, suddenly remembering that I listed 'the board, chalk, wit, humour and interpretive dance' under Teaching Aids.
I'm not in trouble, however, I soon find out. In fact, the Prof liked my plan the most (probably because I copied the heading from his example) and would like it to be shown to new teachers coming to the school next semester. I've had to remove 'chalk, wit, humour and interpretive dance' from it, although I resolutely stand by these as essential teaching tools and to change 'waking up students' to 'warming up students' under Challenges to Teaching - I don't think he thought I was serious. I've also had to change 'forty minutes', for example, which takes up more space and thus fills four pages faster, to 40', which doesn't.
I've made all the corrections, earned myself some favour with the Prof, discussed the translation of "pernickety" with Lin, and doubtless annoyed the professional teachers who've been doing this for more than five months... I just hope that any new teachers think this is what we have to do, or that it's frowned upon to use dance to wake the students up for class.
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Who says you can't dance in class? |