Going the Way of the Unexpected?
After a good decade of teaching hard, Epiphany #1 : Learning—the enduring, meaningful kind—almost always gets messy fast, going the way of the unexpected, regardless of how hard I work, how well I prepare, and how many resources my learners and I command. So I began to plan, and put time aside for, the inevitable: my learners and I needing, from time to time, to slow down and determine where we were and why, before we decided what to do next. We came to depend on these time outs to reconnect with each other and re-orient ourselves to where we were headed. Over time, we referred to these time outs as taking a pause for the cause . When my learners and I first started pausing for the cause, everyone felt relief, but then it wasn’t so clear what it was we should be doing to reconnect and re-orient. Make up missed homework? Revise a paper? Catch up on reading? Time, once again, evaporated, and though it had been nice to slow down for a day, we never made enough progress. Ep...