Flexible Planning

I have always been a planner: not in the sense of making the plans, but with making sure the plans were implemented EXACTLY how they were supposed to. When my friends and I would go into the city, I would be the one who knew the plan: where we needed to be, when we needed to be there, and how to get there. Sometimes this caused me to be stressed and not enjoy myself because I wanted to keep us on our tight schedule. If the plans changed or didn't happen as they were supposed to, I got anxious.

Yesterday, I spent at least 5 hours planning for the week. Going into school today, I felt good about my plans and the day went by quickly because I over-planned. However, in our common planning time today, I got so many other ideas that I could do this week that were better than my plan. Therefore my plans are once again changing for the week. This should have stressed me out due to the aforementioned characteristic of myself, but instead it is exciting. I now have a better lesson plan than I had on my own.

I am learning to be flexible. Usually I'll plan something, but then end up doing something else, or spending more time on something that I did not anticipate would be a problem for my students. Today, I had a "great" Social Studies lesson planned. We were going to read The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (Longfellow), and then read another account of Paul Revere's ride from Revere's perspective and compare the two. However, we only got through the Longfellow poem because it was a much more challenging poem than I was anticipating. It is chock-full of vocabulary and very long! However, it taught me to anticipate problems more than I have been. I'm not sure what I would have done differently with the poem, but it would not have been what I did in my "great lesson."

This idea of flexibility is freeing. It reminds me that God has a bigger plan than I do. Sometimes I get frustrated when my "life plans" don't go as planned, but because God is the greatest planner, His will always prevails. If God had a plan for the Israelites when they were wandering the desert, He has a plan for me.