Know when to hold 'em

Our school has a weird way of scheduling the kids. Instead of being in a class for two quarters to get your grade, you get two "mesters", eight weeks at a time. That way, if you pass the first part of a class but not the second, you only have to take half the class over. It means that halfway through a class, I get students coming in and out. Then we have the inveitable changes in and out, all with kids from two different tracks. It's bizarre.

The problem at the moment is that I am required to teach one of my classes To Kill a Mockingbird. First of all, although it's an excellent novel, it's horrible to read aloud to a class. The kids rebelled last week and hid all the books. I actually had them riveted while I defined literary terms, they were so glad not to be reading. So, with only a few days left in the mester and a third of the book left to finish, I opted for an emergency manoeuvre. I'm showing the movie and asking discussion questions on both the book and the movie.

Sometime, when things don't work like they're supposed to, you just have to be able to change on the fly. Lockdowns, riots, political rallies, assemblies, testing - all these things get in the way of teaching, and they do it a lot. There's just never enough time to do what you need to do. Then there's the feeling in your gut when you know a lesson is not working at all. That just gets worse when it's the whole book that's the problem. You have to be able to think on your feet. Sometimes, that means showing a movie.

I recently had this come up with my scripts, too. I was working on an episode of Supernatural for a couple of weeks, and it just wasn't working. The story was getting a little more ridiculous and I wasn't sure what the bad guy's motivation really was. So I scrapped it. Weeks later, I was watching a couple of Supernatural episodes in a row, and the answer came to me. I can use the same opening scenes and change everything else to make an episode that is not only more coherent, but more about the two brothers and less about the guest star. I feel much better about the whole thing. The episode doesn't have to be scrapped, just rearranged. I guess it's not wasted time as long as you're learning.