There are SOOOO many things that a teacher must do in a day, week, month, year, etc. It can be overwhelming! By creating habits and systems you can maximize your teaching time and eliminate transition / distraction time. This is why I’m starting a series called Habits for Happy Teachers. The more these habits become habits, the less you will have to think about them and they will not drain any of your much needed energy. So here goes – habit #1: Pencils.
We are going to start with an easy one – pencils. The pencils in my classroom really annoyed me! I hated it when I went through my introduction and set up the lesson, and then when I tried to transition into students working five students needed a pencil and 5 more needed their pencil sharpened. Whether or not you worked in a low-income school, there were always students who don’t have a pencil. There is nothing that disrupts the flow of a lesson more than the whir of an electric pencil sharpener. And there is nothing more frustrating than having to buy 3 electric pencil sharpeners in one year because they keep breaking (yes that happened to me).
When you are trying to maximize your instruction time, you can save anywhere from 10-20 minutes when all your students begin working at the same time. If you have 5 kids start right away, 5 kids who take 10 minutes to get a pencil, 5 kids who can’t concentrate because of the movement of the other 5 kids who are looking for a pencil, and the rest of the class working at various ability levels, you can see why the students who are early finishers need something else to do while they wait for the students who just got started. This creates more work for you in the long run. Now I’m not saying you have to do your pencils like I do, but you must create a system that works for you. Here’s my system that works great for me!
1- Assume that your class won’t have pencils. Stock up at the beginning of the year when prices are low, so you always have a stash of teacher pencils. You can label these pencils “Teacher Pencils” and hope they come back to you, or you can create a fool-proof system like these steps listed. Give one student the pencil job and have them sharpen pencils at the end of class so they are ready for the next day (you can keep them in a cute cup or plastic tray). Allow any student to borrow a pencil at any time – then there’s no need to punish a student for forgetting a pencil! You just saved yourself some stress and annoyance because you are expecting students to forget and you already have a plan!
2- At the beginning of class before you start the “flow” of your lesson, have students get out their pencils and see who needs to borrow or sharpen a pencil. It is so much better if you have several manual pencil sharpeners (again, stock up at the beginning of the year – I recommend buying a dozen or more to last the whole year). These sharpen very well and you don’t have a line of students waiting to use one electric sharpener. I also can’t stand the sound of an electric sharpener right before I teach!
3- Set the timer. Don’t allow this pencil routine to go on for any more than 5 minutes. Once the timer goes off, students need to be in their seats. It helps to have the timer displayed on the board (smart board, projector, etc.) so students can manage their time and get their pencils ready quickly. You can shorten the time each week, and ultimately have pencils ready in one minute or less (trust me this works!).
4- Keep track of your pencils. If you want an easy system for getting your pencils back, have students write their name on the board beside your can of teacher pencils. At the end of the class period, before you dismiss the students, call all the students to return pencils and erase their names. I did this with elementary and middle school students, and it works great! I maybe lost one or two pencils, but for the most part my supply of pencils remained!
5- Have one cup or tray for sharp pencils and one cup or tray for dull or broken pencils. When students return the pencils they borrow, they obviously put them in the dull cup. This makes it easy to find a sharp pencil, because EVERY pencil in the sharp cup are sharp, and every pencil in the dull cup are dull or broken. This may seem unnecessary to have two separate cups, but I had several students who would stall their work because they stood at the pencil cup for 5 minutes trying to find a pencil that was sharp enough (when I had sharp and dull pencils in the same cup).
6- Be flexible. Some students don’t want to use the teacher’s pencil, especially because they don’t look all pretty and cute. If you have someone with “cute” pencils who breaks the lead and needs it sharpened, it doesn’t take long to use the manual sharpeners. To avoid the distracting movement, I had students raise their hands and ask to use my sharpeners. I would then hand the sharpener to them to use at their desk which allowed me to keep teaching with minimal distraction and movement. The flexibility comes because some students will prefer to use the presharpened teacher pencils, and other students will prefer to sharpen the pencils they brought from home. Allow that flexibility because it also shows you respect their preferences.
7- I kind of mentioned this already, but NEVER punish a student for not having a pencil. Even if the same student comes every day without a pencil. This is an easy way to show our students we care about them. When our students know we care, they open up their hearts to learning. When we punish our students for something as simple as a pencil in the spirit of, “I must teach them responsibility,” we are closing their hearts to learning. We need to pick our battles as teachers, and this battle is not as important as other opportunities to teach responsibility. Furthermore, most students want to have their own pencils, and if they don’t there might be an unhappy reason we don’t realize. Let’s help out our students and maintain a positive classroom by having a respectful pencil policy!
Now imagine a world where you never feel annoyed by pencils and all your students are prepared to work! That is worth the work it takes to develop habit #1!