I think it comes from the fact that I want to plan activities so students actually go through all of the stages of learning, so they have time to sift through what they're studying and come out on the other side with their own understandings that they can carry away with them--free of any teacher trappings. Even my "high achieving" students need to learn to slow down, that learning isn't a race to see who can locate a piece of trivia first from a book or the internet.
I feel that meaningful learning takes time. Lots of time. I mean well, you see, but that means I go slowly--I operate on a sort of geologic teaching time scale. It also means I sometimes irritate the bejeezus out of my colleagues who would like to go at a more reasonable pace (this results in me getting the stink-eye a lot at meetings). It's only the 7th day of school and I am already 3 days behind schedule. However, my inner rebel still refuses to be a slave to a frenetic schedule that some people who have never met my students indirectly imposed upon me when they made their huge honkin' list of seemingly random science stuff every student has to know even if they will never ever use it again in their lifetimes.
But what's wrong with letting students spend some quality time with their own learning? What's wrong with letting my students have the time they need?
Quality learning time is difficult, however, when the periods are shortened this week due to staff trainings. Even though my overall curriculum pace is equivalent to the rate of mountain formation, I have caught myself several times this week going into "gotta get it done only have 42 minutes gotta MOVE this discussion along go go go git along little doggie" mode.
And I hate that. Because that's when I catch myself asking bad questions. And I'm talking el-mucho-stinkos. For example, we were discussing bias in science using the article "Women's Brains" by Stephen Jay Gould. (In it, Gould describes how a scientist named Paul Broca used flawed data to "prove" that women are less intelligent than men, a known fact during Broca's time. Boy, I sure am glad we got smarter since the Victorian era.) I use the term "discussion" loosely, because what really happened in my first two classes was me rushing them through an article with a high difficulty level and then asking them "questions" in which I already had done the thinking for them. For example, I was unconsciously asking this horrible disgrace of a question just to move the discussion along:
"So, did Broca view his data through the lens of his bias?"
rather than:
"Can what Broca did regarding measuring brain size be considered science?"
I finally did ask the second one in my afternoon classes, schedule be damned. The thinking and discussion that resulted was a wonderful thing to behold. And I almost missed it because I wanted to get through my plan for the day to avoid getting the stink-eye at any more meetings.
I'm glad that next week we return to our regularly scheduled programming. I won't feel so pressured to keep up with the curriculum Joneses. I'll get 8 more precious minutes with my students, and I (hopefully) won't catch myself falling into bad teaching practices because of time constraints. My geologic teaching time scale will be restored, my universe will be realigned, and I can get back to the learning I know and love.
I won't be speeding up, I think. But I will be asking better questions.