Planning for the Never-Been-Planned-Before Pt.2

I asked in my last post, "Where does a rookie even begin to plan how to do all of this and to do it excellently for the glory of the Lord, to honor the parents, and to help grow the kids as God would have them?" And I said that I would share more in my next post, well here is me following through on that.

As I said, I really was a rookie with some school and little classroom experience, but what I did know was that the families that started the school were family to me, and they loved and trusted me.  That makes things easier but also way harder because giving up is never an option.  So with the help of our Headmaster, and my friend and brother, Jonathan Sarr, I jumped right in with shirt and tie and all, and boy did I get soaked.  Talk about learning by full immersion.

Once we had chosen what curriculum we were going to teach, we then had to figure out how to actually teach it to a multi-grade classroom.  Like how do you keep everyone interested and challenged when some can barely read and write while others are looking to be challenged and pushed with more difficult concepts?  That was and still is a hard question to answer.  

It has been said that as a Christian, if you want to know how much sanctification you need, then get married, and if you want to know more, have kids, and still more, become a teacher.  Man was I stretched and pulled and poked.  I had to learn the subjects with the students for the most part, well at least how the curriculum presented it, and then process it enough to be learned at different levels.  This was/is hard.  Sometimes you have no idea how it is going to work out, so you admit that and go for it.  This is where planning comes in.

I knew that I needed to be really prepared for each and every period, but one of my weaknesses and fears is the possibility of failure, but as we all know if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.  My tendency is to get paralyzed in the details, you know "paralysis by analysis," and because of this I started out giving the kids way too much and too hard of work, especially with the pre-polly kids (K-2nd graders) like making them memorize crazy amounts of science facts for our sound-offs, which they did well but not without exasperation and tears.  I also gave the 5th grade ladies tons comprehension questions on top of the 10 plus novels they were reading that year, and all because I thought I had to do all of what the curriculum offered.  By the way this also meant I had a lot of grading to do also.

I am thankful that this did not go on too long.  Our Headmaster and Sean K. Higgins stepped in with some timely reminders that less is often more, and with some helpful tweaks to help my planning align more with how each student learns at different stages of development.  I am very thankful for that reminder.  I am reminded of that daily.

I'll have to share some more of my joys and trials from our first year at ECS in another post soon.