Time Management 101

The past few months I have been working on study skills with one of my middle school classes. Each week they receive a grade from me for simply filling out their agendas. Its a simple assignment and they have noticed that there have been significantly less frequency of forgotten assignments. We have also explored personality types and divided the class using Padlet to show how they like to study. We analyzed personality type versus studying needs, as I suspected there was a significant amount of overlap. The penultimate step for this project was an exercise I borrowed from a Sociology professor friend of mine.

Students are given a weekly planner with times pre-filled, but the students have to fill out how they spend their time. As my friend has discovered, everyone is happy to put in the things most important to them like sleep, school, and play time, but they almost always forget homework, eating, and studying. My middle school students were no exception to her college freshmen, NO ONE put in studying, eating, or homework. After the students were done and made corrections. I had them enter their spreadsheets onto the computer and color code them. Some color coded in advance with colored pencils, when they did this they really began to see what their week look likes. 

Look at the pretty organized colors

I teach students from age 4-50 right now, and to keep my schedule straight I have a color coded life. Two calendars, one for my school and a second for family that includes my classes that I teach and take outside of my traditional teaching position. This system works and when you see it, you'll notice that I don't have a good work/life balance (I consider being a full-time graduate student work). I do know that this is only for a finite period of time and is ending soon.

My final semester of graduate school I enrolled in another technology class, but it was compressed and finished in 7 weeks. I figured my thesis was due in the second half of the semester this schedule would work really well. I am able to utilize my planning periods for when I had classes 3 nights in a week. All was going well, until I found out that our discussion posts were all videoed. I would listen to the assignment as soon as it was posted on Sunday, but inevitably wouldn't get around to posting my post until the last minute, AND THEN we had to do a video response to two classmates.

The first week I turned everything in late because I hadn't yet figured out my schedule. Then I started making excuses for why I was waiting for the last moment to finish an easy (to me) assignment. As I went to record my response one morning shortly after getting out of bed (another really good work time for me), I realized I couldn't. I couldn't bring myself to hit record with my bed head, puffy "I just woke up face" and bad lighting. "But" I would argue to myself this is when I budgeted the time to do this and I hate this video discussion and why can't I just write it out.

As I filled out an evaluation for the video discussion I realized that I had to be judicious in my responses while being truthful. The program didn't work for me, because I didn't allow it to work for me. I didn't give a color code to video discussion and make them the priority they deserved. I failed at time management. I made the mistake that my students make and I complain about.

The class was nearly over by the time I had realized my transgression, no time to correct it moving forward. What I can do is learn from it. I thought I was beyond this, which makes this realization even more frustrating. I hope that this makes me a better teacher.