Time flies!

I can't believe we're already at week 10 of our (official) student teaching! Time flies, and I mean that in terms of the semester but also in terms of a single class period. My 10th graders were reading excerpts from Dante's Inferno this week, and it just seemed like I was running really short on time every day! We did read the text in class, and that was mostly because they already have homework outside of class for their big term paper. The plan was to spend a little over a week on the Inferno unit and now it's going to be almost double that. 

My questions are:
1) When am I the one who is holding up the flow of class and should just back off and stop talking so much?

2) Should I give students (10th graders) historical context first or let them debate about the plot of the text on their own before introducing that material?

3) What are effective ways to check for student understanding of the text? Sometimes when we go over the guided reading sheet as a class I get the feeling that only the top of the class understood what happened in the text. Is this because I'm not giving them enough time to process the information or because they just did not understand the language of the text?

4) How do you decide which units are okay to take longer/bigger tangents on

5) What are your tips/suggestions for pacing during a single lesson?

Aaaaand the parent emails are flowing in...

So I'm sitting here during my prep period, and I probably should be doing other work, but I can't concentrate. Well, Jess and I just finished grading the research papers, and I'm just going to go ahead and say that many students (along with their parents) are not too happy about their grades.

One parent in particular emailed Jess saying how he can't believe how his son failed the research paper, his wife sat down and made the necessary edits with him, etc. etc. He wants the paper to be sent home with him, along with a rubric, and then set up a conference to discuss this whole ordeal. As I'm typing this, I'm stressed out beyond belief and close to tears.

So let's back up a week or so. Last Wednesday, I had students turn in rough drafts for me to go through and edit. All 150 of them. I sat down for a collective 9-10 hours and made individual comments on EVERY ONE, highlighting the areas that they needed to work on. I wanted to do what I could to help them do well...makes sense, right? Well, turns out it was a royal waste of time. About half of the students made none of the recommended revisions, and just handed in their original rough draft.

I can't quite understand this parent email, because despite what it said, there was little to no evidence of editing in this students' paper. He turned in a biography despite myself telling him multiple times it needed to follow the idea of intolerance, and there was absolutely no proofreading at all. Almost nothing was capitalized, and he even wrote using "till" and "u." I kid you not.

I don't even know what to do at this point. My co-op said she'd handle it, but I know this won't be the last angry parent I have to deal with over this unit. Everyone has the opportunity to rewrite the paper, but still. The problem in the first place was their neglect to listen to my advice - will that change the second time around? Who knows.

I was having a pretty good week. So much for that.