Two (of Many) Things I’m (Intentionally) Not Good At

Dear colleague,

I was discussing teacher stress and burnout the other day with some educationally minded folks, and we arrived at an insight I haven't written about in awhile. The insight is this: though the teaching workload today is unambiguously stressful and overloaded, much of that stress and overload could be mitigated if we gave ourselves permission to be minimally effective in certain areas of our job.

In other words: pick only a few things to be super good at; for everything else, be just good enough.

This is pretty much the topic of These 6 Things, right? Of all the things I can be good at as a teacher, I picked about six areas to focus all my research, effort, energy, time, and stress on. The rest I allow myself to be mediocre at. It sounds irresponsible unless you contemplate the vastly underappreciated reality that human beings are finite creatures and that teaching as a job today contains thousands of potential directions in which to spin one's wheels.

But I've never written a book (or even many articles) about the stuff I'm not good at. What things do I allow myself to be mediocre at? Do I have the courage (or insanity) to share those with the whole wide world?

(I do.)

Without further ado, here are two things I am intentionally NOT good at in my job — I'm just okay at them. Instead of being amazing at these things, I satisfice. Because I can't be good at all the things.

1. Replicating Lessons for Absent Students

Pretty much all I put on Canvas for students who miss class is whatever was on the lesson slide for the day they were gone. There are the writing prompts we probably did for our warm-up, the general topics of whatever we took notes on, a mention of the article of the week I gave students a hard copy of…that's about it.

When a student asks me, “What did I miss?” I ask them to look at the slideshow and figure it out. This means:

• Getting missed notes from a peer
• Grabbing missed handouts where they're kept up front
• Completing the warm-up if you don't want to miss out on that writing practice

(All of that stuff is good to Woodenize at the start of the year.)

What I don't do for absent students is:

• Record my lessons
• Make sure everything is explained in detail and digitally available
• Micromanage them completing their missed work

Would doing those things I just listed make me a better teacher? Perhaps. Are they valuable enough to justify the extra hours (at home) I'd need to take to make them possible?

No, they are not.

2. Having a “Perfect” Gradebook

Now remember: these two items aren't things I'm terrible at; they are things I'm just far from perfect at.

The thing with my gradebook is, I want the student's final grade to look like the students' actual degree of mastery of the course material. Our department breaks the grade category weights like this:

• 40% classwork
• 60% assessments

For that classwork category, I'm totally content to have one to three assignments per week. That could be Pop-Up Debate participation, warm-up completion, a piece of readable writing students did, a low-stakes quiz — doesn't really matter. If I do one to three assignments per week at 10 points apiece, we'll end up with a few hundred points total by the end of the semester — all in a category that factors 40% toward a student's final grade. This makes the classwork category pretty low stakes.

(And remember, The Will to Learn is my book-length treatment of how I create an environment where grades aren't the focus for me or my students; the learning is.)

For assessments, it's much fewer assignments — a one- or two-part test per unit, developed by my PLC.

For all of these, I try to get grades entered within a week of students completing them. (Late grading isn't nearly as big a problem for student learning as late feedback is, as I explain here. The biggest problem with late grading is that it can end up annoying me and annoying my students. Since the grading has to be done eventually anyways, I always try to get it in as quickly as I can. But when I'm too stressed or overloaded, I'll often just decide to not grade something at all. After all, the classwork category points end up not meaning much by the end of the semester because there are so many of them and they're only 40% of the semester grade.)

Be Good at the Important, Settle for Average With the Rest

It's actually very professional to major on the majors like I describe in These 6 Things and The Will to Learn. Professionals aren't perfect — they're smart, capable, wise, and improving every year.

Being a professional right beside you,

DSJR