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[luminate]

Tonight I am just having one of those nights where I feel completely overwhelmed. I don't even know why. Just having doubts about myself as a teacher, I suppose.

It is frustrating that I probably feel this way once a week. I think it's mostly when I start working on plans for the upcoming week. I just want to do more with my students who are

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[luckey_me]

I always liked in high school when we used Post-It notes to note things in Hamlet. (Words we didn't know, connections we made, questions we had, etc.) I've also seen at a workshop for adults, they had big pieces of chart paper around the room with questions, and people wrote their responses (without names) by just moving around the room. Then, we all discussed responses together. Would you be allowed to let students use phones to tweet responses as they read, or have the homework questions on a blog and their assignment is to comment with their answers? Reading and answering questions is fine, but if it feels stale, see if you can do the same activity but make it look different. (I have it a little easier on this one- I gave my kids a quiz on index cards and they were thrilled because it was on index cards. So weird!)

I can think of more activities for AFTER the book is finished. Could you have the kids make a "Facebook profile" on paper for a character? Could you have them create a playlist of songs for how a character is feeling throughout the book?

The thing is, though, a literature class is supposed to be about LITERATURE. The fact of the matter is that you're going to be doing reading and responding. In student teaching, I completely overwhelmed myself because I basically tried to reinvent the wheel for everything. I told myself I didn't want things to be boring so I kept trying to come up with home run ideas, but it was too much to handle all at once. Now I kind of have a normal schedule of activities that we can do with our new text/ poem/ vocabulary for the week. I can always change it and do something AMAZING if I have the idea, but I don't feel forced to come up with something new and different every time. It really helps me with the planning. I know it would be way different for you than for me, but try not to expect yourself to always come up with the groundbreaking idea. If you're like me, it's never going to come until the night before when you're halfway through creating the mediocre lesson anyway.

Also, if you're ever just stuck on ideas, give me a call or something. I'm also a fan of The Organized Teacher Blog on Facebook and they have Plan Day Sunday where people can post their questions to the wall and other teachers will try to help with ideas. There's not as many high school teachers, but a few, and I think they also have a blog called High School Herd.

Being overwhelmed with the planning does not mean you're a bad teacher. There is the actual TEACHING part, and the planning/ management/ grading/ organization side. The second one is going to be really hard for ANY new teacher, but it will get easier with time I think.