coming through in the clutch

I totally came through in the clutch today and averted disaster with my "nice" master teacher. I stayed up till 2am last night, which doesn't sound like much except that I would have been asleep by 8 if not for schoolwork, and got up at 7 this morning to bust out my unit objectives, final essay topics, and enduring understandings (which I actually had from Nelson's class last semester and modified slightly). It came together when I decided to have them read story #3 before story #2 since #3 is crazy long, so they can read it over spring break. I feel like these stories could go in either order. I got to school early and typed that up so that I had that on her desk when she got out of her class. I did a good, thorough job on this (though doing it in a few hours the night before is not ideal, obviously). I left her that plus a note requesting that we move our meeting back to later in the day, as I had a meeting with a student and some other prep to do for my other class. I knew that she'd have been upset about that if I hadn't shown her anything at that point--she'd have assumed something absurd, like I was doing it at the last minute or something--but since I'd given her the file with the note, I knew she couldn't say too much.

She was fine with switching the meeting, and I told her straight up that I didn't have for her the level of detail she wanted, and that I felt like in order to have had that I would have had to really stay up all night and sacrifice my classes today, but that I feel like I have more done now than I did at the start of Black Boy, so she couldn't say shit. Well, I left that last part out. She was ok with it.

As for the second part, the daily breakdown of what I'd be teaching, well, I hadn't done that at all yet! I needed my whole prep period to print stuff for my other class, so I wasn't sure what I was going to do about that, but in my other class the students peer-reviewed one another's papers for the whole class, so I did something that I hardly ever do--my own work while students are working on something else. There wasn't anything else for me to do in class anyway, as they were all on their own and working well. So, I busted out my calendar--and I actually did it in the last 10 minutes of class as well as for five minutes or so after class--literally while I was walking to my meeting with her! But it was fine, and she was happy with it, and I have lived to teach another day.

She's observing me tomorrow, and I feel like if that goes well, then she will be off my back. I feel pretty much prepared for tomorrow, so we'll see...