Frustrated and anxious

This was a rough week but it was my first week of teaching my own plans and teaching completely on my own. I am exhausted and overwhelmed. I think I worked an average of 10 hours every day and then came home and did more work. Then I spent 4 hours in the school on Saturday making plans. The worst part is, that for all the planning, everyday forces changes. Some kids get some things and others don’t. One class forges ahead quickly while another is stumped by the first concept. And then there is the inclusion class where I am now working with a first year inclusion teacher who wants all the plans five days in advance. I am feeling very unsuccessful. I don’t seem to be having the sort of encouraging moments that made fields so amazing. I just find myself failing and falling behind. I wonder if this is normal.
I have my first meeting with a parent of a student who is on a 504 and has been diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder but who has not gone back to the doctor for any follow up. Dealing with this child (and the class he is in) leaves me feeling as if I’ve been hit by a bus. Here’s the kicker, I like this kid, he is a bright kid, and if I could spend my day working with him one on one I think we could get somewhere, but I’ve got 60-some other kids, 17 of which are in his class, and I cannot let him run the class which is currently what’s happening. I’m really nervous about this meeting.
Grammar is failing. The kids hate it. And I do too. I have an English degree and edited text books and I don’t know the definitions of the words they are supposed to be learning. I hate this. I asked J what she thought I should do to make this more successful and she paused and said, “I don’t know what to tell you.” She was nice about it but I hate feeling like I just got the stuff she didn’t want to teach. Poetry is going better. I used Robert Frost and Ozzy Osbourne to demonstrate symbolism and it was great. The kids loved it and they got it. They were all able to then independently identify symbols in other poems I gave them. Plus they wrote their first poem for me and they were so cute. Once they figured out that there were no wrong answers, they went nuts. One kid in the inclusion class said, “so you mean if I want to say ‘I’m from heavy hard headbanging highway to hell’ that would be ok?” I was so excited! And made him write he*% instead of hell because profanity is not aloud in class. He totally got it. And that was cool.