Putting in the Extra Work

As a teacher, I had to write lesson plans every week.  You wouldn’t believe how many teachers are still writing their lesson plans in these ancient-looking notebooks that haven’t been modernized since 1952 or so.  I must have missed the lecture in teacher ed where they teach you to write a whole lesson into this tiny square on a grid, all in perfect teacher cursive, of course.

Visual Learners Need Visual Formatting

The old-fashioned system just didn’t work for me. I find type more efficient to read than handwriting, and formatting like bold/bulleted/colored/italicized text even more helpful for taking in chunks of information.  So I decided to break out of the mold and make spreadsheets.

Why All the Extra Work?

Sure, I got some strange looks and comments.  I was called a few versions of overzealous for choosing to color-code the blocks of time on the spreadsheet.  But I knew that I needed more prompting than my peers when it came to schedule changes and transitions, and since I’m a visual learner I had to give myself as many visual cues as I could.

For some teachers, it was enough to write down the name of the activity they were doing at that time.  They’d never need to look at what they had written because somehow they could commit an entire day’s worth of lessons to memory.  I, on the other hand, knew I had to break down each lesson step-by-step and have a copy of it handy in case I suddenly lost my train of thought.

No matter how much I hated having to do so much extra work just to do the same job as my colleagues, I couldn’t not do it either.  On the few occasions when I thought I could just do things the normal way, there may have been minor chaos in my classroom!