This makes more sense out of your recent writing.

And Jonathon’s point is well-taken: What used to take three hours, a pint glass of Bushmills and at least 45 minutes of interior football (four first-year male teachers living in a suburban house so big there were rooms designated solely for the running of pass patterns) now takes 15 minutes.

I gotta say, too, that different kind of time, the difference in the kind of work you put in, is, in many ways, the difference between the guy who creates the lightbulb and the guy who makes the lightbulb better. Even if the latter is more effective, I always had more fun doing the former. It’s that transition, rather than some of the dire warnings about burn-out, that I’d call your attention to, Dan. I find myself as effective as ever, maybe more so, but it doesn’t feel as good, the fourth time I did this cool lesson didn’t feel as good as the third, which didn’t feel as good as the second… And you can go home muttering under your breath that it’s about the learning and about the kids and not about you, but that’s only partly true, isn’t it? I get stuck in an endless cycle of needing to create and recreate, with ever diminishing returns, not in the form of student achievement, but as the bottle-rocket of the brain. It’s shooting less high and bursting into ever dimmer light.

In other words, the better I get at this stuff, the worse I feel.

But, assuming you don’t come to your lessons completely emptyhanded, that maybe you’ve got a few examples you’d like to talk about, or some notes you’d like to discuss, or some drawings you’re definitely going to put up, all we’re talking about is investing the time drawing and writing those things before class, on your own time, so you can get through more fun stuff in class.

Plus my boardwriting’s godawful-terrible compared to Keynote’s crisp, anti-aliased lines, so there’s that, in my case.

Jeff, I’d jump at the chance to have a look at your handouts if you felt like posting them.

I’m working on getting a whole paperless (well, as paperless as I can) system together for next year, so when that’s going I’ll definitely have those handouts up.

I know this sounds negative, and I don’t mean it to. The amount of effort you’ve put in is clearly amazing. But to the extent possible, you probably want to scale back. Take care of yourself. Beginning teachers burn out at an amazing rate. And remember that whatever you have done, you will probably be able to do it better, faster, in the future.

Your gigs of material, how easy will it be to give some of them up, to throw some of it out? But you will be a more experienced teacher, better able to consistently produce high quality stuff, a few years from now.

You’ll need to be careful not to make decisions about keeping or junking material next year based on the amount of time you put into it this year.

After my first year, when I learned that other teachers had material they could have handed me, I made it my mission to try to prevent beginning teachers from doing too much lesson planning. Time spent on management, on questioning, on delivery of instruction etc, is far more valuable. Plus, lesson writing is very slow at the beginning. I can write in 20 minutes today what would have taken me 3 hours 10 years ago.

I saved a couple of lesson, worksheets, and tests from my first year. It makes me sad and angry that anyone let me kill myself producing such mediocre stuff.

Teaching is not about being McGyver. It’s about being part of the A-Team. Get other teachers at your school on-side and work together. After all, it’s not about us, it’s about the learning… :-)

I have never spent 18h on one lesson but some come up to about 10-12h. It is not common but there is no question to me that those hours make a better lesson and I know I can reuse them with little modification next time on the same topic.

The biggest problem with PowerPoint/DVD style lesson are that they normally become more “fixed” than those not so hard planned lessons and I know that one of my strong points is my ability to feel and understand at the moment what is understood and what’s need to have more time but I have learned to not feel like a failure when I need to leave my preplanned lesson to go on the fly instead.

My goal is to make a few new “great” lessons each month and still try to keep the rest at “good”.

Personally I think as a math, physic teacher it is more important to spend a lot of time with students when they approach me with questions on their breaks and after school.

When it comes to working to much I think it is important to remember that we don’t get paid to work 60h week but if that is what makes me(you) feel good then go ahead. It is important to remember how much we are paid to work when we judge other teachers and that most good teachers gives many “normal lesson” mixed up with “good” here an there and that students and society cant really expect more with the workload they give us.

Whether that’ll mean anything ten years out remains to be seen. Exactly how much my workload will drop next year will remain kind of a mystery until next year also, but I have a hard time believing the difference between starting out with zilch and starting with several gigs of slides, handouts, and lessons, is as negligible as you’d have me believe. Hell, even if I pull an extra hour of sleep each night I’ll be ecstatic.

Jeff, I’d jump at the chance to have a look at your handouts if you felt like posting them.

Ten hours of effort for a first year teacher is worth perhaps one tenth that for a ten year teacher. And any ten year teacher who is using their 2nd year lesson plans…. well, I don’t need to finish that. I’ve never met one.

Look at it this way: if you were right, one really good teacher would send out a (book if it was a few decades ago) (dvd if it is today) of the perfectly worked out lessons for each course. None of us would ever write lessons.

In fact, it would be a good thing if first year teachers were handed a notebook or dvd with a set of reasonable lessons to use. The beginning teacher has enough to learn. But over time, it becomes possible to modify, then to write one’s own. But as our teaching changes, so do our plans. As our students change, so do our plans. State standards. Standardized assessments.

Look, I use similar lessons year to year. There are parts I keep identical. But I consciously keep a few, and write the rest fresh. It keeps me fresh. It keeps the material appropriate for the students in front of me. And it allows me to continually reflect and modify.

When you asked for some logic stuff, I produced a list of topics. I have taught some form of logic for 7 or 8 of the last ten years (mostly shorter units; only the last two years have I had the elective). But I didn’t offer plans. I have a few worksheets. But each class gets freshly prepared ideas. And that’s the way it should be.

“Incidentally, this here feels like a significant separation between old and new guard teachers. I have two large filing cabinets in my classroom (you know the type) which, for all I know, function only as dormitories for rodent and insect life. My instruction is entirely digital. Every Keynote lesson, every handout, every hour I’ve ever invested in my practice this year exists in reproducible bits-and-bytes. I carry my career around on my keychain.”

A guy — could — jump on the ‘why all the 2.0 fuss?’ bandwagon over this pretty telling self-description you offered, however, but that’d be exaggerating to make a point.

All that matters is that you’re invested. We’ll let the historians years from now sort out the semantic artifacts.

In the meantime, have a hell of a close to your year. Enjoy the kids. Period. Definitely curious what your summer — refuel and renaissance alike — has in store for you.

Cheers, Christian