Thursday, January 3, 2013

A Perfect Semester...

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.