My first teaching job was at a public high school outside Chicago, and every week I had to submit that week’s daily lesson plans to my department chair. These plans included objectives and activities for each of my classes each day.  I did this for the first two years I was there. It was totally oppressive, but it sure taught me to create well-planned, well-timed lessons.

I haven’t been able to shake that habit even though I have been teaching at NMC for fifteen years. I still have a pretty clear lesson plan for every day. Some days, when I’m doing something complicated or new, I still write my plan out including time allotted for each activity, This was the case last Friday. I had a plan–there was a lot we needed to do, and I needed to keep things moving to get everything in. And then, about fifteen minutes into class, a student asked a question that led me to totally abandon the plan.

It was an innocent enough question in my 8 am English 99/108 class. We were talking about run-ons and fragments, and she asked why writing was so much harder than speaking. We talked about that a bit, and then she asked the five Chinese students in my class which was harder for them. They all agreed that writing in English was much easier than speaking: they had time to think about vocabulary and grammar, and they didn’t have to worry about pronunciation. A non-Chinese student asked if Chinese has grammar. And then all sorts of linguistic questions started flowing. At one point, one of the Chinese students came to the board and wrote three sentences on the board to demonstrate how Chinese deals with verb tense. Then we talked about slang and about dialects–both in Chinese and English.

This class is incredibly diverse–there is an African American student, a Native American student, a Latina student, the five Chinese students from different parts of China, and a number of white students. This diversity has often worked to inhibit connection and cohesiveness in the class, I think, but on this day, we were absolutely celebrating our diversity. And the students learned so much–about culture and language, for sure, but also about each other. This conversation lasted 40 minutes–and it was absolutely NOT part of my lesson plan. But it was completely worth it. And it was a good reminder for me that planning is important, of course, but so is flexibility and seizing the teachable moment.