Knowing When to Hold'em and When to Fold'em.

Do you remember when I wrote this super motivational post about how awesome teaching is last week? Your students are amazing! They can do anything! They are the future! Teach them well and let them lead the way!

Well they still are amazing. They still are the future. And we should definitely teach them well and let them lead the way (thank you Whitney Houston).

...but sometimes...WHEW! Teaching can be a hot mess y'all. 

It's the truth. If you say it's not then you are most certainly, no doubt about it, a liar liar pants on fire. 

This week for instance--I was riding pretty high on my whole shark post from last week. I was feeling pretty invincible. My students were so confident that I decided to try a similar lesson again this week. So I set about it. I meticulously crafted my lesson---scaffolding for the various needs of my children. I set up my Materials Store with every needed detail in mind. I pre-selected literature and website resources to coincide with my lesson.  

.....And then, I watched my perfectly constructed art lesson quickly descend into a fiery trainwreck. 

Here's the truth about teaching. It is a profession that will keep you unbelievably humble.

Why are some lessons great and others not? Because no matter what we cannot--not ever--no even for a second--forget the fact that we are not teaching in a vacuum. We aren't teaching robots. We are teaching actual people.

And people are susceptible to the day to day emotional ebbs and flows that come with the oh-so- wonderful experience of being human.

On this particular Wednesday I was attempting to teach my lesson in the afternoon after a very, very hot outside play time. The students also had swimming that day and they spent a good part of their morning playing in the other preschool classes. They were tired--Super tired!--and what they really needed was someone to read them a story, sing them a song, let them lie down, and breathe for a moment. They did need to cut tiny pieces of paper into circles.  

As teachers we can plan, plan, plan until we are blue in the face. BUT in the end... we need to know that sometimes our ability to run a successful lesson is going to run on an eclectic recipe of improvisation, creativity, and desperation. Sometimes a lesson runs on knowing when to 'walk away' and try again the next day. Sometimes it means telling your students that you're going to have to go back and think of another way to explain something. Sometimes it means regrouping and restructuring the execution of a lesson. In the words of Kenny Rogers--"You gotta know when to hold'em... know when to fold'em."

In this particular case I watched in wide-eyed horror as I realized I had made a huge mistake in thinking this lesson was going to happen. I had the students write the name on the back of their paper and we read a story on the rug to close the day out.

The next day, I restructured the lesson so the students were able to work in small groups with an adult at the table. They took their project from table to table so they could receive the directions in a small group setting and have specific assistance in the even that they were unsure of how to do something. It worked so much better.