This week, I began listening to the a ADHD Rewired podcast hosted by Eric Tivers, who introduced me to my new favorite word: imBOREtant. In an effort to assist adults with ADHD, Tivers facilitates an online study hall, during which participants are encouraged to take care of items that were boring but important to do, thus imBOREtant. While I was not able to participate, I think it's a great concept.
Tivers' strategy takes this measure of accountability one step further. He creates a community in which adults can support each other through the mundane tasks that no one really wants to do, especially not adults with ADHD. By checking into an online study hall where folks can see you doing your work, you are ensuring that it will get done. When I make my network aware of my own accountability, it raises the stakes and gives me a clear goal to reach.
The podcast prompted me to reflect on the tasks in my life that I would categorize as imBOREtant. Interestingly, many of them fell into the parenting province, but one biggie is related to instruction.
Scheduling, or should I say Schedu-HELL-ing:
On the home front, this one takes first place (or should I say last?) for the most imBOREtant work. I am one year overdue for my first mammogram. I should have gone to the dentist two months ago. But those things require me to engage in the stone aged practice of talking into a phone in real time with a human being. Two weeks ago, I called my endocrinologist's office to get a prescription refilled, and after being on hold for more than five minutes, I hung up. Unfortunately, I didn't call back for another five days, and by that point my medication had not only not been refilled, but I had also missed a dose for several days. I don't abandon these self-care tasks because I don't think they're important. I abandon them because I find them really, really boring.
It takes a lot of time and problem-solving to reconcile my work schedule, my sons' school and child care schedules, sports and activities schedules and my husband's work and travel schedule with the varying appointment schedules of dentists, pediatricians, therapists and more. Scheduling for my family is something that has to be done sitting down, in one place with a calendar in front of me. As often as possible, I try to schedule future appointments at the doctor's office when I am checking my children in or out. I make appointments for school vacation weeks or over the summer. But there are times when this isn't possible. I've tried scheduling in the car, and it never works. Ad nauseum, I've griped that I wish doctors offices would offer online appointment booking as an option. If I can use an online patient portal to renew prescriptions, why do I have to call someone live to make an appointment?! My kvetching isn't going to fill my 8 year-old's cavities or get my 3 year-old his flu shot.
Last year, during house hunting, I refused to look at any other towns because of the upheaval it would cause. The paperwork upheaval... Who wants to fill out school paperwork all over again?! I would like the day to come when online appointment booking is a norm, as is a universal form with all of my children's health histories, that goes wherever we do. But that day hasn't come yet, and until it does I am responsible for scheduling and completing all paperwork. Boring! But… Important. My kids need their wellness visits, the school needs immunization records, the pharmacy needs a hardcopy prescription to refill medications, and I need to call the insurance company to find out something... I can't remember exactly what right now, but it relates to a deductable.
Scheduling is not going to get any easier. So I need to make the phone my friend. Aside from, of course hating the phone to begin with, I also have a job that makes it very difficult to call someone during the workday. My school day starts at 7:25 AM, before the traditional 9-to-5 workday begins in offices. My lunch hour is occupied with cafeteria duty at least one day a week, and offering extra help most other days. I do extra help and club meetings during lunch because I like to get to my children after school as soon as possible. Therefore, it would make the most sense to complete family scheduling in one of the free planning blocks that I have in the early afternoon at work. This would require me to send myself reminder alerts on my phone. If I don't do this, then I will automatically go to grading papers, making copies, and all of the other teaching minutiae I am accustomed to doing that I do not find boring. I would have to remember to keep stationary and envelopes in my desk, and bring my checkbook and a folder with family paperwork with me to work so I can fill out picture day forms, basketball registration, field trip slips, and all the other forms I hate. While it's inconvenient for me to do this while I am at work, it would be a lot more inconvenient for me to do this type of work at home when my children are awake. I can grade papers after they are asleep, the same as I could grade papers at work. (I don't find grading papers boring, since I live by the rule that I never assign anything that would be boring to grade.)
Making a plan to make better plans:
On the school front, the award for most boring task to complete is: lesson plans. I definitely write them. In my mind. In fact, I am constantly revising them. I revise my lesson plans every day on the way home from work, between classes, and even as I am teaching a lesson. This week, for example, when it became clear to me that some of my students were ready for a lesson while others weren't, I had to differentiate for readiness. This involved splitting the class into groups, some of whom needed more time to work on a project, others of whom were ready for peer feedback. Since I am not psychic, I did not know on Sunday afternoon that this is how my lesson would roll out later in the week.
Over the summer, I use backwards design (UBD) to plan full instructional units with essential questions. At the beginning of the unit, my students know exactly what their final assessment is going to be, and I plan intentional formative assessments to take students through learning experiences they need to succeed on that final assessment. At the beginning of the year, they have an entire course outline which lists all of their assessments, every text that we will be reading for the year, hyperlinks to all of those texts, and embedded links to all of the documents, including CCSS aligned rubrics that I use to assess their final assesments. Clearly, I am not a slacker. I know where we're going. The problem is, I use a workshop method in my classroom. We know what the endpoint is going to be, we know what all of the stages are that we have to pass through in order to get to the end point. So, what's the problem?
Just as not one of my children is the same person as the other, not one of my classes is the same class. There are different dynamics, different methods that work for different groups, and much of what I do in the classroom is reliant on diagnosing issues and prescribing the best course of action to address them in real time.
This week is a good example. On Monday, students had the day off. It was Columbus Day. On Tuesday, I met with four of my classes. On Wednesday, all morning classes and the first class in the afternoon rotation were canceled due to the PSAT and the senior breakfast. So, I taught zero classes on Tuesday, which means that one of my classes will meet once more this cycle than my other three do. Do you find this confusing? Yeah, me too. It is especially confusing on paper. In my classroom, since we use a workshop model, I will have no problem adding additional instruction for that class that has one extra meeting. I'll conference with students, they will have extra time to write, and it will all work out. But how do I write a daily lesson plan for that? Which language arts standards should I select? What objective should I state?
Formal daily lesson plans are tough to write in week-long batches. They are for my bosses, not for me. I'd be happy with flow charts, diagrams and jottings on a legal pad, but that's not what suffices. I think the key to tackling the imBOREtant task of writing lesson plans is, paradoxically not considering my bosses as the audience, though they do see them. It's actually to consider my students as the audience of my daily lesson plans. Instead of feeling paralysis over not writing a perfect daily lesson plan, I could perhaps share my objective , standards and planned procedures with students briefly at the beginning of class, and then at the end of the day go back to my online plan book to revise it based on what we have actually done. I can also upload my revised plans at the end of the week, which would be evidence in support of my overall teacher evaluation in domains 1,3 and 4 of the Danielson Framework. So the workflow that has always been in my mind can also be reflected on paper too. It's a win-win.
How does all of this translate to my feelings that the task of writing up daily plans is imBOREtant? Well, I can now limit the amount of time I spend on my plans to one hour each weekend, since I know I will be tweaking what I have. Rather than feeling pressure to make my plans perfect and then feeling frustration that they never roll out the way I originally wrote, I can write shorter plans and revise them to reflect what actually did happen. I can also use my afternoon planning time to do this task. (When I'm not calling the pediatrician or scheduling a mammogram.)
My takeaway from learning this new term is that the imBOREtant stuff isn't going away. It's not going to get addressed by anyone other than me. I've got to change, because the tasks aren't going to. Learning this term also prompted me to submit a new topic for the #BFC530 morning sparkchat. How do all the folks in my PLN handle the imBOREtant tasks on their to-do lists? I'm looking forward to finding out their tips and tricks.
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