THE ALL IMPORTANT LESSON PLAN

The following is an excerpt from an autobiography that I have been working on from time to time, entitled TEACHING IS HELL. Much of this essay deals with my sojourn at Hillcrest High School from 1971 to 1989, when Florence Aronson was the principal and Al Weiner was the chairman of the social studies department.

THE ALL IMPORTANT LESSON PLAN.
The lesson plan is to teaching what the Rosetta Stone is to Egyptology. Without a lesson plan you are doomed to being an UNSATISFACTORY teacher, ready to be drummed out of the school system in disgrace. Chair-people analyze your lesson plans the way Orthodox Jews dissect the Talmud. You can teach the greatest lesson in the world, one in which your kids exit the classroom communicating with God. But if you do not produce a lesson plan a U observation report will enter your file, and you are well on your way to being declared a TEACHER IN NEED OF IMPROVEMENT.
Placido Domingo can sing an aria without a score in front of him. James Levine could conduct the entire Ring Cycle without sheet music in front of him. Yet, if you teach lessons without the written plans you are ready to be court marshaled. On many occasions administrators would open the door to my room, surreptitiously tiptoe in, pick up the LESSON PLAN from my desk, look at it for a minute, and then slither out the door. The Lord of the Universe found the plan to be ok, and the world can go on. Under this Byzantine system Plato and Socrates would have been issued U ratings, as the two never had lesson plans when they taught. The kids could literally be jumping up and down but if your lesson plan is well written you're a great teacher. Usually the plans find the way into your file, often attached to your observation reports, a permanent archive of your teaching abilities.
Millions of taxpayer dollars are wasted daily, and countless hours of professional time are devoted to improving the almighty lesson plans. Workshops are devoted to improving the pivotal questions and medial summaries tucked away in the recesses of the plan. Questioning techniques are endlessly reviewed and debated, to see if they conform to the highest echelons of Bloom's Taxonomy. I'm sure that the kids who just completed a recent drug deal are extremely impressed by the expertise of the questions.
The less facts you place in your plan, the better off you are; as kids should never have to memorize facts. Knowing the names of illustrious people and critical historical events is not important; as long as students are aware of vague general concepts. It’s not important to know who Stalin, Trotsky or Lenin was, or how Communism operated, as long as you just realize that Communism was something really terrible that negatively impacted the lives of the average Russian citizens.
Over the years chairmen have sat down with me after observations to dissect the intrinsic meaning of the lesson plans. I was once told that the use of the phrase ERA OF RECONSTUCTION in my aim was incorrect. Everyone knows that it is the AGE OF RECONSTRUCTION. The fact that the emmenant historian Kenneth Stampp wrote a classic work still used history courses at ivy-league universities entitled the ERA OF RECONSTRUCTION is totally meaningless. Even though Stampp devoted his entire life to research on the Civil War and Reconstruction, his expertise cannot hold a candle to the knowledge of a chairman such as Al Weiner. I remember once teaching a fantastic lesson on the economic causes and effects of the Reformation which piqued the interest of a class reading well below grade level. Like most historical topics, this is really of not much interest to most of our clientele. After looking at my lesson plan the chairman informed me that the lesson concentrated too much on the political repercussions of the Reformation and not enough on the religious aspects of the Reformation. This is why the taxpayers pay the chairmen the big bucks. I'm sure Johnny Smith would never have been arrested for armed robbery had I only been able to ask him, "Johnny, what did Martin Luther really mean by the phrase EVERY MAN IS HIS OWN PRIEST?"
If you have a great teacher who daily imparts knowledge to the kids, what does it matter what's in his lesson plan; or even if he has a lesson plan. A great teacher can even lecture to the kids part of the time, and get through to them. When I was in high school many really great teachers never used developmental lesson plans. My terrific American History teacher, who inspired me to teach social studies, never put an aim on the board in her life. She really knew her stuff, and you really learned U.S. History. You also learned tons of facts, a dirty word in today's educational milieu. She never asked pivotal questions and had medial summaries. I hate to say this, and teachers are not allowed to say this, but the kids basically know nothing about history, nor any other subject for that matter. If they did, there would be no need for them to attend school in the first place. A qualified teacher with a Bachelor's and Master's Degree in their subject field knows a lot more than the kids. He should be imparting this knowledge to the youngsters in any way, shape or form he deems appropriate at the moment. If the kids learn the subject matter, and pass the almighty Regents of course, what difference should it make how he does it? He's the doctor and kids are the patients.
The secret ingredients in a lesson plan change every year. The Board pays millions of taxpayer dollars to the best and the brightest to think up new innovative changes to the Torahs of education. A few years ago the gurus at the Board ascended the mountain, came down with new tablets and decreed that every lesson PLAN must provide for ten minutes of GROUP WORK. Since periods are roughly forty minutes in length, 25% of the lesson consists of GROUP WORK. Theoretically the youngsters are supposed to be sitting around in small groups delving deeper into the topic of the lesson. Kids who are virtually illiterate now become mentors and gurus to their fellow students as the blind lead the blind. In the middle of the period when the kids have calmed down and settled into the lesson the teacher instructs them to rise and move around into groups. The teacher must then calm them down again.
The chairman is the ultimate referee in determining whether your lesson plan, or your actual lesson, is SATISFACTORY or UNSATISFACTORY. When he or she walks into your room during the course of the period, sits down at an empty desk in back of the room and takes out the little brown notebook you can't help but tense up and be a bit nervous. You never know what they will write down and how they will word it. There are twelve ways to write up what transpires in a lesson; and one of the twelve can hang you. They excel at knowing the one way. As the lesson unfolds they are writing down every word you utter as though they were court reporters keeping a transcript of the testimony of a witness.
After the lesson is finished they will spend countless hours writing and typing up the all important observation report. The final line will read THIS WAS A SATISFACTORY LESSON or THIS WAS AN UNSATISFACTORY LESSON. Many days later the treatise is finally typed up and you are handed three copies of the report, which you must sign. The first copy enters the archives in the principal's office, the second copy enters the chairman's sacred file and the final you keep. Kafka had THE TRIAL and administrators have “the file.”
The entire process is in reality a form of harassment, as the observations are utilized to arbitrarily and capriciously micro-manage and split hairs over each aspect of the lesson and your teaching in general. The administrators justify this waste of time with the propaganda that "we are improving teaching." This is how administrators justify their livelihoods and existence. If they didn't spend hours each day writing up teachers they would have little to do. If they merely talked to you like a human being about how you might improve your methodology, the handing down of the keys would take very little time; giving them too much free time. By authoring extensive tomes on a forty minute lesson they have proof positive that their jobs are vital to education and society. If they didn't write up teachers educators might actually work hard to the best of their ability and do a great job. In a Catch-22 we wouldn't need chairmen if that were the case.
The goal of administrators is to take perfectly fine teachers and find negative aspects in their teaching. In my case in the 1980's my principal, Florence Aronson, kept claiming that I was not fulfilling my aims, a malady that could easily morph all my students into becoming functional illiterates. How do you know when an aim has been fulfilled any way. It would seem to me that if the kids do ok on the Regents or class tests, they must have learned some material. Can they master the subject matter in a classroom of unfulfilled aims? How do we get inside the heads of the kids to see if our aims have been fulfilled? Can Joel Klein devise tests for this? Now we are really getting into a philosophic and ethical quagmire for which I have no answer. I suppose only the principals can answer this question for sure, since they are the ones who wear the halos over their heads and rule by divine right.
Once a teacher is deemed "in need of improvement" they can be called into the chairman's office for discussions on such weighty topics as improving pivotal questions in lessons, providing students with better medial summaries or having power aims. The chairperson then writes up long accounts of each office session, making sure to pat himself on the back and show how he is improving your teaching. All of the stacks of paper generated by these sessions provide another reason for the chairman having a job in the first place, as he is improving your teaching.
It always seemed to me that if the chairmen were the Master Teachers, why not have them teach five periods a day? Let them do what they allegedly do best: TEACH. Have them impart the wisdom on loan from God to as many students as possible. Let them reach the unreachables. Why should they have to waste their time producing stacks of documents worthy of a St. Petersburg beaurocracy?