Necessary evil?

I have been reflecting on my pacing for my curriculum and frankly, I wish I had done things a little differently. Often times, I hear a lot of complaints among my follow interns about district-mandated pacing-guides and benchmarks. Sometimes, not all the time, I wish I wasn't thrown in the deep-end of the curriculum-pool.

The only thing I have to help me decide what to teach is a textbook. I mean, of course, there is my subject-leader and the other math teachers that I have for support, but they don't help unless I ask. I do ask and we meet every month, but I wish there was more collaboration between me and the other Algebra teacher; who is also my subject-leader.

Since we are a charter school, we don't follow a pacing guide, nor do we get benchmarked to see if we are following the pace. I'm glad I am trusted to teach the way I want to teach. I was told to try to teach the four big topics in Algebra. They are broad topics. However, the pacing is all up to me. I hear about how some interns have pre-made lesson plans, homework and tests. I spend a lot of my prep, making homework packets and tests.

We just finished a lesson on factoring polynomials, something I picked up in high school pretty easily. However, my students were not so quick to grasp the concept. I think I did almost all I could to teach factoring polynomials, yet most of them did not do very well on the test. Since I need to move on and get to the other topics, I've decided to continue and not re-teach this unit.

I think next year, I will postpone factoring polynomials until after we graph linear equations. Also, I will probably spend the summer creating my own pacing-guide. To answer the question, I don't think pacing-guides are necessary, but they are evil.