Forgiving myself for mistakes and trying to catch up

So I had this burst of inspiration in the bathtub two nights ago. It was a romantic tub experience--just me and Bridging English--which I was reading for ideas and inspiration for teaching ideas. I got really excited about this "authentic assessment" I came up with--an assessment that isn't the typical artificial, arbitrary school assignment but that's something adults actually do in real life. Students are to imagine they work for Child Protective Services and are investigating whether Richard (main character of Black Boy) should be removed from his home or allowed to remain with his mother, who is very violent and neglectful with him, but this is in the backdrop of a very violent time period and, in a lot of cases, she's trying to give Richard tough love.

I was really excited about the assignment, which I made the relatively insane decision to give the next morning (yesterday), when I realized that it was the most suitable time to give the assignment because of where we are in the book.

While I did think of a lot of questions they would have, there were some that I hadn't fully thought through, which took a lot of time yesterday that I had hoped to use for other things. Then, today, admittedly I wasn't as prepared as I would like to have been. (Do I really have to trade any kind of social life away to be a good teacher?) I did do two really productive hours of work in the morning before class, when I actually wrote my own rough draft of the essay to think of what problems the students might have.

It occurred to me when I was doing this just how easy this process was for me to write a strong response to this essay and at the same time that it was probably very scary and daunting for some of my students. As a result, I decided to give them a rough outline of what an essay could look like. I went over two outlines (by outline I mean giving the topic sentence or main idea of each of the 4 paragraphs)--one for each stance the students could take (leave Richard with his mom or remove him). This is what I regret. First of all, it took more time than I planned (due to my own wishful thinking, really--in retrospect it's not surprising this all took the amount of time it did), which meant they didn't get peer review time, which I had told them they would. Second of all, I feel like I kind of gave them "the answer" in that they will substitute whatever approach they had for my very formal one. (Well, it actually wasn't *that* formal, relatively speaking, but it was pretty formal.) I guess I was just concerned that some of my kids would have no idea what they hell they were doing, and I thought this would be really helpful. Maybe it was--except the room got very quiet when I did all this outline stuff: not a good sign.

Now I'm concerned because we are supposed to have a debate tomorrow, which will help them with their essay, but we haven't done peer review, which I told them they would do. When I told them we'd do a debate tomorrow, one student called out "That actually sounds really fun," so I am definitely going forward with that, and I don't want to short-change that, but I also want to give them time to do peer review. Thus, I think I'll do the full debate tomorrow and give them an extra day (Wed instead of Tues) to finish their essays, and we'll do peer review Tues (after the holiday Mon; I am so thankful for George Washington and Abe Lincoln). My only concern there is that I want them to move forward with the reading, and yet, if they move forward with the reading but we don't discuss it then we fall behind and don't cover so much of what there is to cover in the book.

I suppose it's a nice problem that there is just so much I want to do with this book. I strongly recommend those of you who teach English to teach Black Boy if you are able to. There's such great text-tapping potential on the big picture level (like with my assignment), as well as on the sentence level.

Part of the intention for the subject of this posting in terms of "trying to catch up" is trying to catch up always with this book, but more is in terms of not falling behind each day so there's a crazy scramble every night or morning to really be prepared. I have yet to have a day with absolutely zero scrambling, where I had done 100% of my prep (including making up all overheads and photocopies made--ugh; I hate the photocopying process) more than an hour or so before class. I think about these things when I go to bed at night (or in the afternoon, like I did for 45 minutes today as soon as I got home), first thing when I wake up, and at every imaginable inappropriate time in between. Ugh. I need to bust a move this long weekend to get ahead of the game.