All of you real teachers are free to contradict me, but I've been noticing lately that the life of a teacher is a constant game of choosing what not to teach. It's coming up on test time once again, which means fewer lessons for us assistant language teachers.

"Are we team teaching today?"
"Well, there's a lesson, but I'm going to do it by myself. After the test, we'll have a lesson together again."

Even progressive, experimental teachers find themselves constrained by the amount of material they have to cover. We'd like to help these kids make some of these concepts their own with new activities, new ways of thinking, new assignments. But the subjunctive needs to be done this semester. Factoring is on the final. The Tet Offensive is on the test.

If horrible sports analogies are allowed in this forum, when it comes down to it, you'd wish for nothing more than to be able to spend every practice doing speed-building drills or working on serves. Right now, though, your only option for the final tournament looming in the distance is to keep feeding balls into the machine and pray that enough of them come back across the net for the kid to pass. Doing your job means that at the end of the day, the basket has to be empty. Your duty is to send all the balls over, it's the kid's responsibility to make contact. Learning proper grip? Sorry, we don't have time for that. I still need you to take a swing at these eight irregular verbs before it gets dark tonight.

PS