Smart Teaching with Minimum Efforts and Maximum Results

Become a Better Teacher by Working Less

De: Albert Elisha Oberdorfer

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Are you burdened by a workload that seems to overwhelm you?
Are you engulfed in a daily grind and boring teaching routine that zaps your energy and productivity?

IT’S TIME FOR AN UPGRADE.

The Pareto principle—the 80/20 rule—says that 20 % of what we do causes 80% of the results. To be more effective, we need to find out what works and keep doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Apply some simple, valuable time-, money-, and energy-saving strategies to lighten your teaching load and be several times more effective such as:

• How to tame the social media beast that kills your productivity,
• How to use a simple decision-making process of Define. Eliminate. Simplify. Automate. and Delegate. to de-clutter your life and teaching,
• How to make Parkinson’s Law work to your advantage, and others.

Find out how to become a better teacher by working less.

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KAIZEN.

THE JAPANESE call it ‘Kaizen.’
We call it continuous improvement.
Continually upgrading.

How much sense does it make to be spending hours upon hours cutting a piece of meat?
With a knife that is not up to the task?
Or blunt?

It would make sense to invest half an hour into sharpening the knife.
Or even buying a super sharp ceramic kitchen knife.

The Pareto principle— the 80/20 rule—says that 20% of what we do causes 80% of the results.
To be more productive, we need to find out what works and keep doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

THE BUG THAT CAME IN THE MORNING.

DILIGENCE MAKES THE DAY—OR DOES IT?

I LOOKED at my watch, and it was just before 5 am.
That’s when it came.

I still remember it so well because when I heard the deep humming sound, I was so glad and curious at the same time.

I had just finished grading the last pieces of the final exams of a reading and writing class—for those of you who know, it was 311 Reading and Writing 1.
I had started at around 10 pm the evening before and been super diligent in correcting every sentence of the students’ writings with a red pen in great detail.
I felt like a keen editor for a peer- reviewed journal. (Actually, I had done editing research papers for medical journals for my wife before then.)

I needed to grade about 24 pieces of 1-page- long writings.
And it took me 8 hours of overnight hard work.

So when I heard the beetle’s sound, I was so thankful that I had finished grading and that I got to see this exciting creature.I opened the door to our verandah and tried to locate it.
It sat on a vine resting.

I felt for it.
Because it had this huge body and relatively small wings, in proportion to that huge fat body.

So it sat there—a beautiful specimen.
And I sympathized with it.

Because I thought that it has to carry this huge body around on those relatively small wings.
(According to the laws of aerodynamics, those creatures—like beetles and humming bees — are not even supposed to be able to fly.)

And then the sun came up and flooded us with its glorious light.
I was so glad and overjoyed that I got to see all this.

But the point is this.
Today, I am grading the very same paragraphs in about 1/5 of the time.
On that day it took me 8 hours.
Today it takes me from 1 - 2 hours max.

And I’m more effective in those 1 - 2 hours than I was in those 8 hours before.
I give better and more accurate and useful feedback than before.

I am learning that being diligent is not always a good thing.
Only if it is smart diligence.
Not necessarily hard work.
Imagine the loaf of meat once again.
Cutting it with a razor-sharp knife would do the job in a matter of minutes.

ETC.