I'm down in Florida for a few days, tending to some family business, and I have to say that I really miss my students and my classroom. Will the sub know how to start up the computers? Will she know how to log the kids onto the network? It's silly to be so nervous, I know. We get good, dedicated subs in our district. (They have to be dedicated. Do you know how much substitutes get paid?) But I still have this feeling that nobody can run my classes in the same way that I would.
Because I don't know which sub I will get, I am always reluctant to leave complex lessons involving particular skills such as changing page orientation in Word or assigning transitions to PowerPoint slides. You'd think these specific skills would be easy to teach as opposed to a lesson on the causes of the Civil War or interpreting a novel. The problem is that every step has to be exactly right and it can be tough to get all twenty-five kids to do a series of steps correctly. Just as you're getting to step four, you discover that somebody is stuck on step two, and as you dash over to help, the kids who got to step four want to know where they go next. Of course kids are pretty good at helping each other, but that isn't enough to get everybody through the sequence. So one of the big challenges in teaching computers is that it requires accuracy. You can't get approximately the right menu or the right toolbar button; you have to get it right. That makes it hard to differentiate and allow for creativity. But I find ways to do that, which I will come back to in another post.