Teachers Helping Teachers: Help! There’s Not Enough Time to Finish This!
It has happened to all of us. You’re looking over your last few weeks of lesson plans, flipping through the number of pages left in your book, and thinking, This can’t be right. And yet the calendar doesn’t lie: you’re not going to finish the book before finals. Whether things took longer than you expected, your school administrators threw unanticipated schedule changes your way, or you just miscounted (it’s happened to us all), you’re stuck wondering what to do.
Well, for starters, take a deep breath and show yourself some grace. We do the best we can, but sometimes, life gets in the way or we make a mistake. If you’re interested in learning more about our planning process, check out “The Unit Plan Dilemma,” “Timing Tips,” and “A Successful First Planning Sesh,” where we talk about tips for avoiding this specific problem. But never mind that, future you can check those out. Right now you is in crisis mode. We’re here to help you figure out what to do now.
Scenario 1
If you’re lucky enough to realize you’ve got this problem before you start the unit, congratulations! You’re in the best-case scenario (well, second to actually being able to carry on as planned, we suppose). If you don’t have time to get all the way through the text, think about what you need students to get from it and what alternate text or activity you could use instead. We’re lucky, as English teachers (how often do we get to say that?), because we don’t have specific content we have to get through in order to ensure our students don’t have gaps in future years: we’re essentially teaching skills that can be practiced with a wide variety of texts. Choose a shorter text you can work with for this year, and when you have time, go back and figure out how to pace the semester differently next year.
Scenario 2
If you’re realizing mid-unit that you’re running out of time, you still have options. We’ve found ourselves in this situation before, and these are some strategies we’ve used to make it work:
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Pare the activities you had planned down to the bare bones and get through the entire text. Whether you want to still assign a few guided reading questions to help students focus or navigate trickier parts of the text or you’re confident the text is accessible enough you can cut them entirely, focus on giving students the reading experience or give them an opportunity to practice reading endurance and hold students accountable for reading comprehension on the final exam. We have finished To Kill a Mockingbird more than once this way.
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Decide on a few key scenes or chapters that are important and summarize what happens in between or let students watch the film version to fill in the gaps. This works well if you have a final project you still want students to complete or if there are a couple passages that merit close reading and discussion set amidst less important passages. We did this once for Julius Caesar and ended up liking it so much, we changed how we taught the play for several years (sorry, Shakespearean purists).
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Switch your final project to an in-class essay. One year, we were running behind with To Kill a Mockingbird (are you noticing a trend here?), so instead of a process essay, we switched our prompt to something students could answer reasonably in one class period, buying ourselves more time to finish the novel. Note here, for your future self: if you’re teaching a novel at the end of the year, check when your librarian expects to have the books returned. It’s often surprisingly earlier than you would expect.
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Create an assignment that sends students on a scavenger hunt to find information they need to know to understand how the story ends. Julius Caesar is a tough text to excite standard-level sophomores about (though we have certainly tried!), and unlike most of Shakespeare’s plays, the most exciting part happens in Act 3. Before we started using an adaptation, we read through Act 3 together and then assigned students to find key points in Acts 4 and 5. They got what they needed to understand how the story ends, and we saved ourselves a couple weeks of tedious in-class reading.
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If things are really dire, and none of the above will offer any relief, embrace it. Let your students know you are human, things come up, and despite your best efforts, it’s just not going to happen. Any students who are upset about this can certainly finish on their own, but in reality, most students will probably be just fine with it. No harm, no foul. Get as far as you can and alter your final to cover only those parts you got to.
What about you? Are you struggling to finish a text on time this year? Do you have one that has tripped you up a few times? Have you been in this situation, too, and have strategies to share? Connect with us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works to let us know!