It’s the Final Countdown 
Dear colleague,
It's March. Good gracious, do I ever love March. It's just hard not to love…
- The cracks that appear in Michigan's Jan/Feb sunless frigidity
- The longer evening sunlight
- The prospect of spring break just around the bend
- And importantly, the idea that, three months or so from now, this school year will be in the books
But Dave, you might be thinking, you're not one of those burnt out teachers that counts down to the end of the year, are you?
No, I'm not currently burnt out. (Though that ebbs and flows often, as I discussed in last week's talk.) But yeah… I do count down to the end of the year. Because counting down can help an earnest teacher out. It can help with student motivation.
And it can also hurt.
Let's look at what makes the difference.
Counting Down Can Hurt or Help
First, let's go with the negative. You can definitely harm your Credibility and the Value of your class with an end-of-year countdown. If you give your students the impression, for example, that you can't wait to be rid of them and free from your job, that can obviously work against the beliefs you're trying to cultivate in learners.
When we count down in this manner, it becomes a crass endeavor. We end up (perhaps accidentally) saying, “What we do here isn't important. It's something to be survived, to get through — nothing more.” I get why we can end up counting down in this way, but it's a draw we must resist.
But on the positive side, counting down can be fundamental to sensibility and wisdom.
- “Teach us to number our days,” the Psalmist writes, “that we may get a heart of wisdom.”
- You've got only 4,000 weeks or so, Oliver Burkeman contends — use them consciously.
- The key to getting through your curriculum each year, I've argued, is setting test dates on your calendar.
(See how I positioned myself next to Moses and Oliver Burkeman there? Shameless…)
You'll know you're doing the countdown right when it helps you craft the semi-paradoxical classroom state that I call “gentle urgency” (see Strategy #3 in Will To Learn). A countdown like this can help you and your students orient around the reality that class time is precious, that human lifespans are finite, and that even in March, the time we're given is connected to those last days of school that are coming in May or June.
The work we do now, in other words, directly affects who we'll be then.
So let's use the time wisely.
The Final Quarter Countdown
And so we arrive at what I call the final quarter countdown. Each school year, there are three basic phases of the work we do:
- The first 90 or so days
- The middle days
- The final 90 or so days
Beginning, middle, end. The teacher's journey, the student's journey — they're arranged in this way. Where you're at in the journey directly corresponds to the kind of work that makes the most sense to focus on.
That's what I'll explore, in brief articles like this, throughout March.
Because March is the PERFECT time to think precisely about what it means to be teaching toward a countdown.
Teaching right beside you,
DSJR
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