Long Range Plan

I am glad we have had the opportunities to write our own long range plans and talk about them with our classmates. The format we have been using seems like it will be helpful to us in the future when planning lessons. I'm not sure exactly how much they are going to be used when we actually get out into the field, though, and I would like to know what everyone else's field teachers have told them about this.
When Shannon and I asked to see our teacher's long range plan, she thought it was kind of funny, I think. She said that her principal doesn't make them keep them, as long as they are able to produce, when asked, what they are doing on a given day. She keeps hers more in a calendar format in her grade book, and she showed us that she always writes in pencil so that she can change it if the students aren't grasping a concept or if the days get disrupted for some other reason.
One thing that concerns me about long range plans, if they are used by teachers "religiously" is that if the students aren't getting something, you may not be able to spend too much time explaining it, or you will push everything else back until you simply run out of time. To remedy this in my plan, I planned three days for my final project to sum up the unit, and would use this time as flexible time to reteach anything that the students weren't understaning.
I think that, regardless of whether we will be required to do something this formal in our future careers, this project has been a positive learning experience for me.