According to research, did you know that on average, teachers make 1000 – 1500 decisions (@1 every 4 minutes) during the school day?  This is more than a brain surgeon makes in a day.  Personally, I don’t like that it’s called decision making.  That makes it sound like I’ve made a decision and everything is fixed and finished when in reality, I’m still making edits and changes as I go, so I prefer to call it tweaking instead.

Tweaking is a learned skill, something that goes right along with pacing and sequential lesson planning.  Let me give you an example of what I would refer to as tweaking.  A class walks in.  I observe HOW they walk in behaviorally.  I can tell if they have a substitute teacher, if there’s a storm on the way, a full moon or a holiday just by the behavior.  I immediately begin tweaking in my head how I will run transitions in the classroom.  After all, as teachers we are the kings and queens of differentiation – some classes can handle more leniency and others need more boundaries, depending on what’s going on and it’s never the same.  I would dare anyone who has not taught in a classroom to just come and observe one day.  Better yet, give it a try.  You might prefer to train to be a brain surgeon.

Then there is the lesson plan.  As a young teacher, I wrote down every detail.  Now I sketch an outline because most of it is in my head.  Lessons that I’ve taught for years that have stood the test of time.  And then you have that one class that gives you the deer in the headlights look.  They don’t get a thing you’re saying or understand the directions you’re giving.  Time to tweak.  Tweaking means you have enough tools in your bag, enough knowledge about your subject matter, enough analogies that you can teach something you’ve taught the same way for years in a completely different way because these kids need it taught differently.  I can slow the pace, I can use different materials, I can have kids peer teach – with more experience comes more ways to tweak and the tweaking gets faster and faster.

The one thing nobody ever tells you, and something I really should confess to my student teachers, is that the better your ability to tweak, the more exhausted you will become.  I’m convinced it’s not an age thing at all.  As more research tells us, what happens is that as we gain more experience, the more patterns we recognize and the more quickly and efficiently we can make decisions.  This. Is. Exhausting.  It’s like your brain is on overdrive for hours, a lot like being in flight or fight mode.  And if you’re like me, you find yourself tweaking everything else in your life because you just can’t stop when the school day ends.

This could be why people who retire from teaching look so much younger and refreshed.  They aren’t having to tweak a million times a day.  It’s also why I believe some people really miss teaching – the adrenaline rush isn’t the same as it was.  I often refer to teaching some of my more “active” classes as playing whack-a-mole.  It’s a challenge to see if I can keep up, get everything done I need to get done AND manage to keep all the kids engaged.  And then I wonder why I come home and crash. Even a simple question like “what do you want for dinner’ is one more decision too many.

As a music teacher, tweaking takes on a whole different look.  I tweak what I see and what I hear, tweaking pitches, rhythms, dynamics, tempos, and so much more.  At one point I may be tweaking a particular phrase in the music and then have to tweak some misbehavior going on on the other end of the choir, still maintaining my focus on the whole choir.  It’s a lot like an experienced conductor who can maintain the basic beat and still create the nuances needed to make great music.  In my classroom, my lesson plan is the basic beat, but my tweaking takes that lesson and turns it into something living, something the students absorb and take with them.  Every student is the goal and only by tweaking for each student can I be assured of that.

I have six more days of tweaking – I mean teaching –  for this year.  Then a summer of trying not to tweak so that I can jump refreshed into another year.  Another year of  observing, listening, watching, differentiating and tweaking.