What is a Simply Smart Teacher?

Being a teacher is hard. Being a high school English teacher is harder.

No hate to my PE teachers, you are a necessity in the district, but some teachers just naturally end up with a lighter work load and some end up with a heavier work load. English teachers definitely end up with one of the heavier loads.

Don't get me wrong, most English teachers are completely aware of what we are getting into. We know there is going to be a lot of reading and writing and along with that comes a lot of grading--and all of that equals a lot of time spent outside of normal class and contract time.

When I started teaching in 2010, I was single, living alone, and I could honestly spend all my time and energy focusing on my students and my classroom. As time went on, I met my husband, we started our family, and I decided that I needed a life outside of the classroom. Prior to this, there were days when I would spend 12 hours at school during the work week and then come home on the weekends and spend another 10 to 12 hours--and that doesn't even include the additional work that I would bring home to complete. A class set of essays may take me an entire Saturday to grade, and that was only one class out of the six I taught.

About four years into my teaching I decided that there were some things that I needed to simplify in my classroom and in my teaching.

When I started teaching, I was big on guided reading worksheets. I would assign them along with their reading (both short stories and novels), collect them the next day, and then spend hours grading them. Huge mistake on my part.

My intentions were good. I wanted to make sure they were actually doing the reading, so they would be ready for any deeper, critical thinking activities and discussions we would have in class. I didn't take into account that these types of worksheets were super easy to copy, time consuming to grade, and could actually skew their grades because of the amount of questions that were on them.

So I completely cut out reading worksheets that only touched surface level information. Instead, I started solely doing reading quizzes at the beginning of class. These quizzes were quick and simple and covered only plot level information. This shift allowed me to accomplish my goal of seeing if students were actually reading, and this drastically minimized the amount of grading I had to do. In short it was just simply a smarter way of gathering the same information: were students actually reading.

This is only one of the simply smarter steps that I took in my teaching career. Grading essays is another one, but there will have to be an entire blog series dedicated to that one!

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns feel free to join the conversation on Instagram by following @SimplySmartTeaching.

And if you'd like to check out a simple content knowledge quiz I've created, you can click here!