Question: What is one teaching hack that you can’t live without?
Answer: The best teaching hack that I had was to designate one night where I would stay really late each week. (Note: I was single and kid-less so if you can’t do a weeknight, then substitute it with something that works in your schedule…you get the idea!)
On that evening, I would work from the end of the school day to about 5:30 and then a colleague (there’s usually one who wants to stay late too!) and I would go and grab a sandwich. Then we’d come back to school and go into one of our classrooms (because I am scared of the dark and think that there are monsters lurking around every single corner of any school campus after dark) and just work on our own stuff until about 9:30 p.m.
I would work on the following things in this order back then:
- Lesson planning for next week
- Grading of this week’s stuff
- Photocopying and putting things in the daily folders for next week I kept (I mean NO ONE was using the copier at that time of night!)
What motivated me to stay late? I DIDN’T WANT TO WORK OVER THE WEEKEND! So, the 5 hours of work I would do over the weekend, was basically put on that one night that I stayed late. I worked it into the schedule for the week and made it a social thing with one or two colleagues and it worked!