Freezer Meal Mentality for Teachers
"Planning is bringing the future into the present so you can do something about it now."
- Alan Larkem
Freezer Meal Mentality for teachers
As a consumer in the early 2000’s I remember shopping for a new computer. The salesman tried to simplify the specs of RAM (random-access memory) and ROM (read-only memory) by explaining that by saying ROM could hold data without power and RAM cannot. ROM is meant for permanent storage and RAM is just for temporary storage.
Many years later as a working mom, I really had a desire to provide home-cooked meals for my family that weren’t processed and didn’t take a million hours to prep. I made best friends with my crockpot and discovered the power of freezer meals and my life changed in that 1% way that James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits. It was nothing drastic, but as I look back now, over time, it is a behavior I developed into a habit, and over time has contributed to freeing up time that I can use to become who I want to be, which is not a slave to the kitchen.
This relates to teaching, I promise.
More recently, I was asked to present at a professional development session for a team of online high school teachers on the topic of time management and organization. The date of the engagement perfectly aligned with a habitually planned Saturday of prepping freezer meals for my family. Every quarter I take stock in my freezer to see what needs to be replenished to ensure that I have an assortment of meals that I can drop in the crockpot when I know a tornado day is coming and I don’t have to think of a thing because all of the ingredients are there, in a nice little Zip Lock bag, ready to go. It only made sense to draw the parallel between freezer meals and personal management for my PD.
I honestly had a blast sharing time-saving tricks and tools to help save time in their online teaching setting. The concepts were simple and I have a giant opinion that the steps of creating delicious, low-maintenance freezer meals are transferrable to approaching the often overwhelming task of being a teacher.
A LITTLE WORK TODAY CAN SIMPLIFY TOMORROW!
THINK AHEAD
PLAN - CONSIDER PREFERENCES
GATHER INGREDIENTS
DO THE WORK
SET ASIDE
THAW AND COOK AS NEEDED
As teachers, this is a natural process that is so habitual we sometimes don’t notice that we are creating a game, printing game pieces, laminating them, storing them in cute bins that are color coordinated and symmetrically lined up, only to be sure they are ready to go and reused next time. Initially, there is some extra work, but the very thought of not having to re-prep is the motivation that makes the act of cutting laminated game pieces palpable.
Knowing ahead of time what we are trying to accomplish gives us direction, a point on the map that we are trying to reach. Professional Growth Plans are the educational lingo to represent the idea of beginning with the end in mind. However, a spot on the map is irrelevant if we do not have the directions of how to get there, OR if we don’t even know where we are starting out on our map. The systems we have in place are what gets us to the goal, not the goal itself. Our day by day actions determine our outcomes.
If I decide I want to be a teacher who can have a life outside of my classroom, there are some things I can do now, to help free up my brainpower and allow that to happen. Automating, systemizing and organizing our teaching tools NOW will allow us to freely give our attention to our learners LATER. Hence, the ROM and RAM analogy. The more of our teaching that can be saved to our hard drive, the more brain space we have to manage our classrooms, help students learn, and boost ourselves in our profession.
TWO SCENARIOS
Scenario 1: Mrs. Jefferson knows that she has a savings unit coming up in her financial literacy course next week. There are two group activities she wants her class to engage in that will take her some prep time. The week before this unit, she notices on her calendar it says “prep for savings activities” for her planning hour. She remembers that during her teacher's workdays before schools started, she printed everything she needed and had it laminated at the printing center. She cut everything out while she binge-watched the last season of This is Us. She quickly went to the storage box marked SAVINGS ACTIVITIES to retrieve her materials and marked if off on her planner.
Scenario 2: Mrs. Jefferson knows that she has a savings unit coming up in her financial literacy course next week. There are two group activities she wants her class to engage in that will take her some prep time. The day before the unit starts, she decides to gather her resources. She scurries to her computer to surf the internet to see if she can find the activities she wants her students to do. She can’t find the one she has used last semester but finds one that will do. She prints it out and heads to the office to make some copies. Unfortunately, the copy machine is having challenges and eats the original. She heads back to her room to print another and notices she has 20 minutes before she needs to leave to pick up her kids. She decides to print what she needs from her classroom printer, depleting the ink levels and the quality of the printouts. She doesn’t have time to cut them out, and wouldn’t want them laminated due to poor quality. She decides the students will use valuable class time to cut their own pieces before instruction starts. She can always just remake the resources next time.
Which scenario describes you? Are you tired of flying by the seat of your pants and feeling like you are just one step ahead of your students? A small part of this is normal during your first year, so you are not alone if you are relating to Scenario 2. However, it is possible, even during the first year, to be able to create a system for prepping prior to paranoia. It is possible to sleep all night each night, if you put in some time PRIOR to paranoia. Just prepare! “If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.” Keep the big picture in mind. Develop your go-to ideas, resources, tools, and relationships that you can pull out at a moment’s notice to save you on a tornado day.
