anxiety dreams, migraines and a much needed day off

This week I had a dream that my Henry James final paper literally tried to kill me. I am sure that is a totally normal dream, and I am a completely well-adjusted human person. Aside from dreaming of words coming off a page to strangle me, a personal crisis made the start of this week as stressful as I can imagine. Everything has worked out in that department, and I think I am fully recovered from the shock and agony. That being said, I spent the entire week housing my very first migraine. What a terrible house guest. My students noticed the change in my behavior, and instead of being angelic teenagers, they piled on to the tune of 30 students not completing a final draft, and another 20 who did not include any sources or Works Cited page. Considering a big part of the grading rubrics was implementation of sources, it has made it incredibly difficult to know if they learned a fucking thing during the last four weeks.

Such is the life of a public school high school teacher. All of that added up to a much needed sick day. I took Thursday off to recover, and it was glorious. I slept, watched like five episodes of the Great British Baking Show, and even cooked a nice dinner for my wife and I when I got home from TCC class. You may ask why I took Thursday and not Friday, thus giving me a 3-day weekend. That is an excellent question. Wednesday of this coming week is the AP Literature exam, and Thursdays I do not have my AP Literature students, but Friday I do, and I would have felt I was doing them a disservice missing one of their last days before the exam.

Two more weeks of my first semester of grad school. Everyone in my life thinks I am insane for tackling everything I am planning to tackle in the next year. Maybe I am, but I am going to conquer it. Well, if I can figure out my damn assessment plan for TCC I will conquer it all. For some reason I cannot seem to crack this thing. I use backwards design at the high school level all of the time, and I should be able to do this easily, but every time I sit down to do it, I stare aimlessly at the computer for like an hour, then type for a bit, then delete everything, cuss out loud a bunch, then slam my Chromebook shut. It really is the thing standing between me and having a solid draft of my portfolio.