I’ve probably complained about this a lot this year, but I’m gonna keep complaining anyway.
A few weeks ago, I decided to skip the weekly lesson planning meetings because the other teacher would waste time during them and the lesson plans sucked. I did the plans on my own, and everything was working great. I wasn’t the only one skipping the meetings, so our team leader emailed a week ago and said they are mandatory and everyone needs to attend. So I said “fine, I’ll go and just sit there. I’ll still do my own thing for the lesson plans.”
And today just proved that I need to continue doing my own thing for the lessons. THIS CHICK’S PLANS SUCK. Here’s why:
In one weeks worth of lessons, she has said to cover Main Idea, Author’s Purpose, and Text Features. But our district’s outline that we are supposed to follow has those taught over THREE weeks. I mentioned this to her, bringing up that next week we are only supposed to cover main idea. She said “yeah we’re covering that and some other stuff”. Then I said “it just seems like a lot for only one week”. And she said “well I did it this way last year so I’m gonna keep it like this.” Okay fine you do what you want lady.
Well THEN in one day of plans, the modeling & guided practice were all about text features and explaining those and practicing identifying them. BUT THEN THE STUDENTS’ INDEPENDENT PRACTICE IS ABOUT MAIN IDEA. What the hell lady. This isn’t rocket science. I could lesson plan in my sleep (and sometimes I do). It doesn’t take a genius to know that if you are teaching the students about a skill, their independent practice should also be about that skill. At that point I totally checked out and just wrote in my composition book some lesson plan ideas for what I’M going to do next week. Which is teaching ONLY main idea (following the guidelines our district provided us with) and actually teaching it in lessons that freaking make sense.
