Just as Clark W. Griswald pictured the perfect family Christmas, I often picture the perfect semester. Here is where this plan often falls apart and where I hope to head off disaster.
1. Lack of scheduling. I HATE having to schedule days in the computer lab at the beginning of a new semester. BUT, I will do it. I did it last year and it worked out beautifully. I arranged to be in the computer lab once a month and designed the assignment in the days leading up to the pre-arranged day. The result was a number of incredibly relevant activities that were engaging even though my pre-arranged days never fell when I originally hoped they would (thus NEVER coinciding with the piece of literature I'd hoped, but you'll have that).
2. Stay on task. I have a grand plan of having students use blogs once a week to do whatever I envision them doing, then I forget to remind them to do them and we fall out of our rhythm. :-( This semester I plan to have the blog topics pre-scheduled on the calendar to keep them foremost in my mind.
3. Plan B. Now, I am pretty good at having a plan B, but I'm hoping to challenge myself to be more creative with my plan B plans. :-)
Hopefully, these three steps will enable me to make my dream semester more of a reality and my Cousin Eddie won't have to kidnap anyone to make things work out in the end.
