Whole-Book Unit #1

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

There are few groups of people as stressed as kids in the last two years of high school. Every adult they know pounds them with questions about what they’re going to do next. Some of them have calm, confident answers, but most of them are still just trying to figure out who they are — let alone what they want to do the rest of their lives.

Time management might seem to them like something for elderly people to worry about, but having to juggle school, work, sports, other activities, college applications, and other commitments means having to figure out where their hours should go.

Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals takes a completely different tack on this. Burkeman not only argues that we should not try to optimize every second of every day — he argues that it is impossible. Instead, he points us in the direction of prioritizing a few parts of our lives to do really well — and suggests that we lean into our relationships as much as possible.

Your class will get the focus of this book after the first two chapters, so we’ve designed a unit that has the whole class working together until Chapter 3. After that, it becomes a jigsaw activity for groups to complete and present. You can run this as a Socratic seminar unit all the way as far as you would like, and then you can have your classes complete a variety of creative activities. It also works well as a group study in the weeks after the AP test when you’re looking for something a little more independent.

If you teach AP kids and would like some practice essays associated with this book (the Q1 prompt is possible to do even if you don’t have your kids take on the book), click here (links to free Google Drive resource).

If you think you might teach the book and want to check out the Socratic seminar and jigsaw activity guide, click here (links you to a TPT page).

Let me know what you think!