The Blue Blog

I was personally very thankful for the topic of this week’s reading because classroom management is one of the things I have always felt very nervous about. I found it very true to life that the authors included a brief mention of the fact that many teachers, at the beginning of their first classroom experiences, feel that there is so much time to be had that there will be no way to fill it up. I myself have thought this time and time again, possibly because there was a lot of “down time” when absolutely nothing was happening in several of my high school classes. These lapses were not due to discipline problems, although they sometimes caused them, but they happened because the teacher was not ready or just didn’t have anything left for us to do. Out of these experiences, therefore, came one of my main concerns, having enough material to fill instruction time. Now that Carol Weinstein has put some of those fears to rest, I would like to comment on some of her suggestions for maximizing instructional and engaged time.

The discussion in the text about block scheduling realistically highlights some of the benefits and problems with using blocks instead of traditional hour-long periods. My high school switched to blocks just before my senior year, and this structure does provide a day with fewer interruptions caused by attendance, getting settled down, and other beginning of the day transitions. However, there were several problems with the system that I think make it a poor choice for maximizing efficiency in the classroom. One is simply the length of the classes- even if a teacher had a class full of at least semi-interested students, it was so hard to stay attentive to one topic for so long that everyone’s mind was wandering by the end of the class. The instructional time might have been maximized, but the engaged time was not any more. I think the more frequent switches in the regular school day helped with attentiveness. A second problem occurs with lunchtimes, since some classes had to leave class, go to lunch, and then come back for the second half of the class. This means that for one class, there had to be two transitions back into the period. Also, I personally had to wait until right before my very last class to eat lunch, and I would get so hungry that I couldn’t concentrate on much of anything. Finally, the AB-block system presents another problem when a class only meets twice a week. This causes too much time to pass between opportunities for instruction, and some instructors had to spend a lot of time on a Tuesday going over what was covered the Friday before.

Moving on, I can’t help but notice some of the strategies mentioned in the reading were things that teachers did that absolutely drove me crazy as a student when teachers used them in high school. If I knew that I would have to go into a classroom and start on a transition assignment right away, I used to be angry because I felt like I was losing some of my five minutes of down time. Yet, looking back on some of the chaos that used to be the beginning and end of a few classes, I can understand the need for the transitional activity. With the two perspectives in mind, I think that if these beginning of the class period activities should be something easy, such as the map exercise mentioned in the book, in order to let the students have a mental break. I also remember not wanting to turn in different parts of an assignment (bibliography, rough draft, etc.) because I felt like I had to freedom to work at my own pace. Now, I wish instructors would make us do that more often as a way to pace the work, and I definitely see the advantages of using this strategy to monitor how students are doing in order to make efficient use of time in the classroom.