Speaker 1: I started this year with a video with five time management tips for teachers. In this video, I'm doing somewhat of the reverse. I'm talking about three issues, three problems with time management that you want to avoid, right? So let's go ahead and dive in. Hey there, I'm Erica from Ever Educating, and this channel is teaching tips, tools, ideas, and resources for college instructors or even high school teachers. And again, today I'm talking about, you know, issues with time management that teachers can have, you know, things they do that are actually making things worse rather than better. And so again, I have a make things better video link below. But to start with here, the first thing that you really want to make sure you avoid doing is creating too complex assignments for your students to complete. And so what do I mean here? Obviously, you want to challenge your students. I'm talking here about too complex in the grading process. So my first semester teaching, I still remember it was a writing class, and I created units that had five different things that I collected from students at the end of the unit. And so grading took me hours upon hours of time because for each student, I had, okay, here's your outline, and here's your research notes, and here's this thing, and here's that thing. And the next thing you know, they're turning in tons and tons to me, and I had so much grading to do at the end of the semester. So I really recommend avoiding doing that. You know, you can have sure a super challenging assignment if need be, but they turn in one thing or two things at the end of the unit, right? They can turn in things throughout the unit, so you can grade as you go. That's fine, right? Maybe you have a five thing to do, but you turn in one a week until the fifth week, right? That's fine. But first thing to avoid is having super complex assignments that will take tons of time and energy providing feedback to them, right? So I do have videos about how to curate and design major projects, ideas for major projects, and all of that. I'll link those below as well. But that's, you know, my first tip, avoid these complex assignment creations. The second thing to avoid is grading and spreading out your grading over a large period of time. Now if you just can't, if you have to take little parts of your time throughout the days and weeks to grade, then obviously there's nothing you can do. But if you have large chunks of time and you're not using them to grade, then this can be an issue because if the assignment is just the answers correct or incorrect, that's fine. Take as much time as you want. But if it's papers, for example, your first day of grading, you know, you're nice and new, you're not frustrated or annoyed by anything you're seeing, right? You might say, all right, you know, they didn't do this, but they did do that. This could use some help, 93, right? But then day five, you're, you know, my God, I've been grading forever. There's been some such frustrating writing for some of my students. They're missing this or they're missing that. So now it's day five and you're like, okay, they're missing this, but they did that. And then, you know, this could use some work. And what was first at 93 on day one is now at 88 on day five, because you're just tired of all this grading. So at this point, if you're actually being fair to your students, at the end of your session of grading all of them, you would look back and double check. Okay. Let me see a paper here from day one, a paper from day five. They have similar feedback from me, you know, do this, don't do that. This is great. But now I've given a difference of five points between the grade. Always that's an issue. And so now you need to take even more time to go through what you just rated and make sure that you're not being unfair to certain students who you grade later on in the sessions. So again, I mentioned in that first video, time management tips to chunk your grading, do five at a time, three at a time, eight at a time, depending on how much time it takes to do each one individually. But don't do it so slowly that it's a week, two weeks between the first one and the last one, because then you need to take the time to actually make sure you're being fair to all of your students. And again, this is for assignments that are more fluid, that are more flexible. Here's a paper, here's a career project, that you actually just give feedback and then grade accordingly. Really, I would recommend grade them as quickly as you can. And if you do want more grading tips, I do have videos about that link below as well. But the third and last thing that you want to avoid is saving files in really disorganized manners. So if you have, I'm collecting all this online files and PDFs and images to use in your classroom, but you're just saving them willy nilly on your laptop or on your LMS, that's going to make much more time for you in later weeks or later semesters. Because then you have to search, okay, I know I had this PDF from this class two semesters ago, and it was great. I can definitely use that for this class. Where did I save it again? What was the name of the file? And then now you're spending tons of time searching for it or trying to find it from the original source, remembering the book title, right? And again, time wasted, it doesn't need to be wasted because when you save it to your laptop or save it to your LMS, you want to make sure you're being very organized in how you're doing so. So I do have a video about this and I do have a blog post about this. I'll link those below. But in general, what I recommend is, okay, now I want to make sure that I have a folder in Google Drive that's called the class name. And in this folder, I have other folders, right? And I have everything I need for that class in this one folder. So then later semesters, if I know I taught this PDF in this class, I can just go to that folder and find it in there. Sure, maybe you have tons of files in there, but at least you know it's in this location. It's not, where did I save this? You know, Dropbox, Google Drive, on my laptop, where, right? Stay organized. It's going to really help you down the line. And you also want to stay organized on your LMS as well so that your students can find your materials very easily. So I do mention this in that video about finding free teaching materials that I'll also link below in case you're looking for materials to use in your classroom, but you don't want to pay for them, right? Which obviously makes a lot of sense, right? So these are my three, you know, definitely avoid doing these things so that you can manage your time much better as an educator. But again, below in the description, I have tons of videos that relate to this that you can find helpful as well. Click like if you found this video helpful, subscribe if you haven't already.