The Lesson Plan By Mary Sawyer
It's Tuesday, September 11, 2001, and I’m off to campus to teach my 8:00 am class for future English teachers. Tuesdays are busy on-campus days for me, but today will be different. I’m leaving work early to pick up my cousin Suzana whom I have not seen in several years. She's coming to the east coast for work and making a detour to the Hudson Valley to see us. Yesterday, I put fresh sheets on her bed in the guest bedroom, which doubles as my home office. I usually work on my computer after putting the boys to bed, but I am taking tonight off. I’ve got the wine chilling in the fridge and hamburgers ready to grill. As I step from my parked car and walk toward campus, I breathe in the cool air and silky blue sky. Now I must shift my thoughts to the 3-hour class I am about to teach. The syllabus shows that today’s focus is “lesson planning,” a skill that is the source of great anxiety for students. They will all be expected to produce daily lesson plans in their student teaching placements next semester, and today’s class will show them exactly how to do it. At least, this is what the syllabus says and what I had gamely announced at the end of last week’s class. I have a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction but I am still struggling with how to teach lesson planning. As a high school English teacher, I taught from instinct and creative passion. My lessons were commonly crafted in the late night hours while reading student papers. Or sometimes a half-formed lesson plan would spring into shape during my morning shower. One of my colleagues once told me that in her first teaching position, her principal required that every Friday she submit her lesson plans for the following week. I would not have been able to hold a teaching position in that school much past Labor Day. Lesson planning requires concrete sequential thinking and deductive reasoning, both in short supply to my drifty, random-abstract mindscape. A lesson plan generally asks for the day’s objective, using a “Students will be able to do X” format. Administrators will expect the X to be stated in observable, measurable terms. When asked for their objective in teaching a literary text, most soon-to-be English teachers will say that they wish for students to appreciate it, but appreciation is difficult to measure. What does “appreciation” look like? Sound like? What skills are needed to appreciate literature? These questions masquerade as straightforward. I try not to overthink. My own life is a swirl of conflicting priorities, and my mind is unharnessed, untamed. I reach for my journal at all hours to contain the seepage. In the middle of the night, I jot down the worries that prevent me from being able to go back to sleep. When I am coding transcripts for a
HVWP COMMONPLACE 12
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