Fragmenting my focus

I am reading too many books, talking to students about too many topics, and I can't keep up with my responses to student papers this semester.

It's my own fault that I'm behind. Not only am I teaching an overload--2 sections of first-year composition and 2 sections of Teaching Writing--and directing the writing center, but I've agreed to too many "classes by appointment" (one-to-one teaching arrangements that allow students to take a class that conflicts with another class or take a class in a different semester than the one it's typically offered in, etc.). So I meet with one student to discuss 19th-century British novels and another to discuss writing memoir and another to discuss contemporary lit and another two to discuss YA lit. And then there's the research I'm doing on Julia Alvarez, re/reading all her books, looking up critical material, watching videos of interviews and talks.

But it's making me feel a bit like I'm suffering from multiple-personality disorder. This week I'm reading from a book on 6-trait writing assessment, rereading a memoir about growing up in a dysfunctional family, combing through something like 20 recent books of poetry to select poems I really want to share with a student, rereading a YA novel about a protagonist who's falling apart emotionally, and rereading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao along with In the Name of Salome. (Actually, I'm beginning to see a couple of emergent themes, just listing these books--except for the 6-trait writing assessment, that is.)
I'm split between the freshness of immigrant experience and the familiar, loved territory of canonical Victorian texts, between making sure I know all the well-established critical arguments about a text and forming a critical perspective on poems and novels that haven't yet been loaded with the baggage of a dozen critical arguments.

The good thing about all this is the fun of sitting down with a pile of books, telling myself, "I'll assign myself about 50 pages of the YA novel, and then I'll read about 25 poems, and then I'll reread the last part of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Then maybe I'll read 3-4 of my students' essays comparing the graphic novel American Born Chinese with the play Golden Child. And I'll check a couple of the logs that my upper-level students turned in."

The bad thing is that at some point I suffer brain fatigue, and I start watching Japanese anime, or I find a really good reason to go scoop out the cats' litter pan, or I get out my cell phone and watch all my videos of my infant granddaughter. Hmm, as I'm writing this, I'm thinking it's about time to get back to those essays . . . or maybe that YA novel . . . or maybe video . . . .