In my entire academic career, I have only pulled three all-nighters. My first all-nighter occurred in my senior year of high school. Our final project for Macbeth was to create a board game. I stupidly decided it would be a great idea to make Macbeth Scene It. Although a fun project, I underestimated the time it would take to complete the whole project. Even though I made some progress everyday, I hadn’t divided up the workload evenly. On the Thursday night before the project was due, I was making the DVD, creating a large body of trivia questions, gluing together the question cards, and making sure every last detail was perfect. The hours melted away and by seven o’clock in the morning, I still wasn’t finished. My mom sent an email to my Brit Lit teacher asking for an extension and I passed out on the office floor, knowing I didn’t have to go to school that day.

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My second all-nighter happened in college. I had to take Art 102: Intro to Sculpture as part of my art minor. For our first project, I had to create a piñata. I chose to create a phoenix piñata. And in class, I made great progress: I constructed the body of the bird with balloons, paper mached the skeleton of the piñata, painted the whole thing red to cover up the newspaper print, and created a mini-clay phoenix to "rise" from the ashes once I busted open the piñata (a requirement of the project). All I had left to do the day before the project was due was to glue on the tissue paper and fill the piñata. I underestimated how long this would take. I spent all night (and early morning) gluing little squares of yellow tissue paper to the underbelly of my phoenix to look like down feathers. Luckily, I only had the art class that morning, so I went to campus, torched my piñata, reclaimed the tiny clay phoenix, and went home to take a nap.

 

My third all-nighter happened my first summer of MTC, when I more desperately needed the sleep. About the third of fourth week in, our Units by Design were due. I had originally planned a two-week unit, but cut it in half when I realized I did not have enough time make such a long unit. Just like my Macbeth project, I made a little progress on a daily basis, but left too much for the night before. As did many of my other classmates, I found out. We had an MTC camp-out in the honors college that night.

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I touched up lesson plans, created worksheets, then differentiated those worksheets, included a cross-curricular element, and double-checked that I had met the large number of competing requirements listed in the rubric as I jammed to the Fall Out Boy Pandora Station. I started assembling my UbD binder just after 4:30 a.m., left the honors college shortly after five, and returned to my apartment with enough time to shower and watch an episode of The Big Bang Theory as I ate breakfast. I arrived at Holly Springs loopy from sleep deprivation but with a complete UbD in tow.

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The Mississippi Teacher Corps has pushed me to be innovative, to test my limits as student and educator. At the beginning of each new semester, I would read over the syllabus and panic about the upcoming assignments. How would I have time to do my job, do my graduate work, and still have time for myself? There were many times when giving up would have been the easy, painless option. Instead, I became a better time manager and divided large tasks into smaller chunks. The workload appeared insurmountable, but I survived each round of classes. Each new semester of MTC pushed me to be innovative when I thought I had spent all of my creative energies on the previous one. And although I felt emotionally drained at times, the well of creativity never truly ran dry.