Micro vs Macro: What that means as a teacher

Before I had my own classes to teach, any time I thought about my "hypothetical class" and how I would "educate" them, it was usually the norm to think of big-scale events or long-term structures to put in place. Things like term-long debates, "ideology wars" or a completely revamped grading/reward system were all on the table. It was always very fun to think of how to make lessons like these interesting and it was fun for a very simple reason, there was freedom from expectations. Think about that for a second. If there was an expectation or lesson objective to meet, trying to come up with or even apply such interesting lessons is very difficult.

Something that a colleague told me before I even met my class was that the teacher must always learn to prioritize. At that time, it was easy to file that advice under useful words that I may think about in the future. How naive of me. 

It only took 4 weeks of lessons for me to understand the true value of those words. It's easy to forget about his words because from my perspective at that time, the amount of work and responsibilities that they have is easily 3 times as much as ours, so it felt like something a NIE beginning teacher would struggle with because when they come in, they will take on 2-3 classes, most likely 1 CCA and also perhaps 1 or 2 School Committees, which is an insane workload if you step back and really think about it.

By comparison, I currently (as a relief teacher) only have 1 class and a teacher-project type of thing. Already, I find it hard to think in the long-term when it comes to lesson planning. It's hard to break out of the mentality of "living day by day" every time I want to plan lessons. After every lesson, there is something that they found difficulty with, if you are lucky, it would be a mistake that they have never encountered before, because that would mean that they are learning and thinking about new things. Then, there are the things you have already missed, because it didn't seem appropriate to teach at the time, or that a particularly important learning point is currently being discussed and we don't want that learning point to drift away from their minds if we don't recap or reinforce that point soon. Sometimes, the project will come in the way and screw up whatever you may have already planned. So it's quite hard to break out of that "day by day" mentality.

Of course the moral of the story here is to avoid what I'm doing. Currently, on the last few days of week 1 in this new term, I'm trying to broaden my attitude towards lesson plans, go back to how it was before. Maybe then there'll be some fun. Or better yet, some actual learning. 

Perhaps this will act as a cautionary tale.