ABSTRACT
I started teaching four weeks after delivering my second child. (There are tiny humans in my house born 14.5 months apart.) Figuring out what was important to me in my classroom wasn’t something I could afford to take lightly. I was responsible for building a course called Race & the Law from scratch, and to say I was tight on time is a dramatic understatement. Once I knew that I didn’t know exactly how to start, and I felt the pressure of expecting myself to be perfect begin to climb, I knew I had to make some major shifts in my approach. Otherwise, I’d stay stuck in a sludge of fear and do nothing. Or I’d take the pressure I was feeling and dump it on my students in an attempt to hide just how overwhelmed I was feeling.
