Math Mini-Lessons

One of the kids in a school said my videos were AI lol. Nope! Just hours of me recording math breakdown videos and rerecording when I make a mistake. The 2025 NYS test breaking coming soon for grades 3-8 on YouTube!

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Is this the best use of your time?

That was the question underneath a coaching conversation I had with an overwhelmed teacher yesterday. She was talking about how long it takes to grade homework. Immediately I remembered the pile of papers that used to stack up when I was a classroom teacher. I asked how many students she had.
“Forty.” So we did the math together:

⏱️ 5 mins x 40 students = 200 mins or 3 hours 20 mins

I watched her face change. "That's so much time!" The realization had hit, the root cause of her long nights at work. "I can't take that much time to grade homework everyday!" Then I asked where she needs to put her time and she discussed lesson planning. She admitted she does need to look at exit tickets so how should she use or time? So the real question became: How do I get the information I need without spending 3+ hours a night grading homework?

We talked about the goal of homework: practice. If the goal is practice, then most of that practice should happen in the classroom, where students can get meaningful feedback in real time. She also said she was using homework to look for mastery. So I asked, “How is that different from the exit ticket?” She said she wanted to see what students remembered after the lesson.

So I made a simple suggestion: Keep the exit ticket at the end of the lesson. Add a quick entrance ticket at the start of the next day (2–3 questions on yesterday’s skill). Because she uses Formative, students can capture their answers digitally, and she can scan the data at a glance to make an instructional decision. Now homework doesn’t have to carry all the weight.

So what is a better use of her time? She said lesson planning. We talked about the difference between lesson planning (which is often recopying what is in the curriculum to fit the schools template) and lesson internalization using the Big 3 in a math lesson. What a lot of teachers don't account for is the amount of processing time it takes to do many teacher tasks. This is one of the reasons teaching feels unsustainable. It takes time and attention and teachers are limited in both.

When we internalize the lesson (or the homework or the exit ticket), we do the pre-work:
🔹 Understanding the cognitive demand of the task
🔹Anticipating what student application will look like
🔹Deciding what counts as evidence of mastery
It sounds like more work, but 30 minutes of true lesson internalization is far more impactful than 3+ hours of grading homework.

I don't expect this one conversation to change behavior. This kind of planning takes less clock time, but it requires more focus. And to be fair, sometimes we like the busy work. It feels familiar. It feels productive. Most of us love gaining knowledge, but we resist transformation. That’s where coaching comes in.

What are your thoughts? What tasks are taking the most time for the lowest return? What tasks have a better return on your time? And what might be stopping you from those higher-leverage tasks?