In following Karl Fisch’s educational technology blog, the fischbowl, I came across a blog entitled, 180 Days? (http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2007/04/180-days.html). Fisch and company has created a short PowerPoint uncovering a much more realistic model of the number of days in a semester than the 180 day model that our semester is so often based on. As I watched the PowerPoint, I could almost hear a collective “amen” from teachers everywhere.
Lack of time has been an ongoing frustration for me this year—it seems like more content is trying to get squeezed into fewer instructional hours every year. In the constant educational question of breadth versus depth, my teaching philosophy consistently falls to the latter, and I feel perturbed when teaching introductory or survey courses that seem to want to cover so much ground that both the students and I can’t catch a breath until final exams are over. And rather than the satisfactory feeling of completing another course, I often feel more of an uneasiness because I’m not sure if the course has been much more than a perpetual blur for students from day one.
I did a mental breakdown of my own courses. Designed as 45 hour courses, I lose 10 minutes per course before we’ve even left the gates because our instructional hours in our timetables are only 50 minutes, not 60. Then there’s another couple classes lost due to career fairs or other school activities. Then there’s a staff PD day, and then of course this year we had a snow day. A course jam-packed with content to begin with has now become almost impossible. The solution would be easy—give notes and read PowerPoint slides in class and I’ll fly through the content—maybe even have time to spare. However, if our goal is for students to learn (rather than for us to teach—a very clear philosophical distinction) then incorporating group work, class discussions, project-based learning, etc. is very necessary. But where is the time?
Relation to this course, as we are all thinking of ways to transform our traditional classroom activities and ways of teaching by incorporating technology and the web, one of the main barriers is classroom hours. When a course is product not process driven, I find myself on a constant treadmill from start to finish. Any hiccup could run us short on time. I consider this very carefully as I think about how I am going to incorporate these new tools. Curricular changes need to be made so teachers can have a breather, get off the treadmill, and really engage with students much more deeply and use technology tools to do that.
