Keep All Your Notes

Teaching tip: keep ALL your notes.

After you're done teaching a class or a series of classes,it's very tempting to toss out everything except the"finished" work - the final handout, your polished teaching outline and notes - just the pristine material that looks good. All the scribbles and edits and handwritten notes tend to get tossed. "After all," you think, "who would ever be interested in those?"

Answer: YOU will.

Trust me on this.

The day will come when you'll pull out your file (because you're teaching that again, or a related lesson), and spend a lot of time wondering how you arrived at those questions, that specific handout, etc. It will help a lot if you keep the whole passel of notes you made. You'll be prompted to remember more about how you developed the end product.

Often, what you really need now is not in the end product for that lesson, but in the pile of stuff that you considered, meditated on, but didn't use then. It's perfect now!

One more thing: a day will come (God willing) that you can be coaching some other teachers. These files will become great example materials to work through together, so you can show the process by which you arrived at the perfect-for-this-class material.