By Tom

For me, it's the minutia. The trivia. The day-to-day cycle of planning, teaching, assessing and reflection. Doing it all day long. And doing it all over again the next day.

Take last Wednesday, for example. My third graders are learning how to count money. We started our math lesson by reviewing the value of each coin. Then I presented them with a page that listed the prices of a bunch of school supplies. They picked partners and took turns being the customer and the shopkeeper. The customer picked two items, the shopkeeper added up the prices, the customer counted out the cost using play money, and the shopkeeper checked their work. Both students recorded the whole process on their papers. Then they switched roles for the next round. It was a tricky lesson to teach. I had to model the process several times; enough to get them to see how it was done, but not so much that they'd grow bored, stop listening and not know how to do it. During the partner work I had to make another critical decision. At just the right time, I wanted to stop it to see what they could do on their own. It meant watching the clock and watching my students at the same time, ready to call them back to their own seats as soon as they seemed to get it and with just enough time before lunch for them to play a round by themselves.

That lesson went perfectly. I ended up with 27 kids knowing exactly how to count out bills and coins to make exact change. Of course, the last thing we need is a whole generation of shoppers holding the rest of us up at the checkstand while they count coins out from their little rubber coin purses.

For the sake of the rest of us, these people needed to know about making change.

That, then, was Thursday's lesson. The activity was similar, but this time the customer paid in bills only, and the shopkeeper had to count back the change. Counting on with change, however, is harder than counting up; you have to use pennnies first, to get to an "easy number," then nickels and dimes until you can start using quarters. While I was modeling the process, I got the impression that they weren't quite getting it. I decided we wouldn't go into the partner activity on Thursday; they just weren't ready. I made a decision to keep practicing as a whole class and stretching the lesson into a second day.

Good call. They got a little bored with Thursday's activity, but they were totally ready for the partner work on Friday. And when I called them back to their own seats to do a round of "counting on" by themselves, they all demonstrated mastery. I couldn't have been more pleased.

Those three lessons illustrate the complicated dance of teaching. Negotiating the variables of time, curriculum, pacing, and student engagement to maximize learning. It takes detailed planning, good curriculum, careful observation and experience.

It's not easy, and it to an outsider, it might not look very exciting, but when you get it right there's nothing else like it. It's the most fun thing in the world. It's about helping a group of children understand how to do something worthwhile. Effectively and efficiently.

That's teaching. And that's why I teach.