Stepping in line

For a long time, actually - since the beginning, I have not been writing real lesson plans for my classes.

I've been looking at resources, figuring out what the students need to work on, and pulling something together. I have no lesson plans, no unit plans, no nothing. The last 2 years, I've been flying by the seat of my pants, making things up as I go, letting inspiration move me as it needs to. More than once (and I'm ashamed to admit this), I've come up with what I'm doing in class that day on my drive to work. Occasionally, I'll write something in the little boxes in my teacher plan book, but they're bullet points about skills or pages, not actually what we're going to do, just what we're going to cover. And more often than not, when I do that for a week or more at a time, it's totally bogus by the time I get to the end of the planned stuff. I'm not on schedule, I've skipped things I need to figure out how to backtrack for, I've lost all inspiration and don't know where to go from there. Oh, or I just forget to look in the book once I write it down.

This year, we're being WASCed. Plus, I'm getting sick of reinventing the wheel for myself every year. So I've been trying to keep better tabs on what I'm doing. And, I've begun to write lesson plans. I've only written two so far, but I'm doing okay. Date, objectives, standards, materials/prep, procedure, eval. No problem.

I like working with lesson plans. When I wrote them for credential classes and then used them afterwards, they seem more thought out, more aware, more connected than most of my other teaching. I'm just not a planner, I'm rarely organized, and I seem to have so many other things to do with my time.

So, my question: do people seriously write lesson plans for every day? Wow. This seems like a lot of work. Don't get me wrong, it's good work. I think it'll make me a better teacher in the short and long run, but, man! My little fingers have been typing for mostly an hour now, and I've only written Tuesday's and Wednesday's lessons out. Do these go faster? Are they easier?

And here's my other beef: veteran teachers at my HS tell me that they continue to revise, edit, pitch, and insert new lesson plans every year. Seriously? I mean, I can see teachers go through things and rethinking and everything. But, sometimes they really do start from the beginning? Yikes. So all this work I'm doing this year might be worth nothing next year? Really?