The Importance of Pacing

I understand that there is a lot to teach in very little time, but moving on in a unit before students are ready is not going to get you to the end goal. This week my cooperating teacher had me teaching the students long division because "we need to keep moving along." If it had been my classroom, I would have spent a day or two on multiplication facts because most of the class does not know their multiplication facts. Division, especially long division, is extremely hard if you do not know basic multiplication facts. I personally love math and it is very hard for me to see so many of my students hating math, when I know that a good part of their hatred comes from being frustrated due to pacing of the unit.

I am also struggling with the pacing that has been dictated for the writing unit that I am teaching. The unit is on letter writing. The students need more time to write a letter, than what I am able to give them because I was told that I had to teach certain letters on certain days. The majority of students are very slow writers and need more than half a period to write a letter, but that is all that I can give them with the pacing that my cooperating teacher set. At least, she is seeing that the students need more time and has allowed me cut out having the students write a business letter and give them a day to catch up on the letters that they should have written by now. They will also have a large chunk of time at the end of the unit to "publish" 3 letters, which means that those letters need to be well edited and written neatly. The hope is that they will be able to give those letters as gifts.

There are many other instances in which I have noticed pacing issues. I think that one of the biggest reasons that the students are having trouble with the pacing of the different subjects, other than in math with not knowing their multiplication facts, is that they are required to correct every little mistake. My cooperating teacher has me checking their work and calling them over to fix every little mistake, rather than just marking things wrong and writing the correct answer. I agree with calling students over to go over work with them if they clearly do not understand a concept. I do not think that it is necessary to have them fix every mistake. I feel that it is a waste of my time and a waste of the students time. Some of the students are falling farther and farther behind because they are spending their time correcting old assignments, rather than working on the new assignments. If you want students to correct work, there has to be time built into the schedule for that. It is not fair to students to take away from their time for other subjects. It is also not fair to the other teacher, to keep students during her time to finish our work. I have been getting really frustrated with how much time is being spent on corrections rather than on actual learning. Yes, students learn from correcting their work, but there has to be a balance between correcting old work and learning new concepts. If a student clearly understands a concept and just made a "silly" mistake or two, it is not a good use of time to have them correct those mistakes. It makes more sense to let them work on their new assignments, rather than cause them to fall behind in their work by going back to fix their old work.