Why having a smidge of OCD is helpful as a teacher

I have spent at least three hours on research or brainstorming. What is my attack plan? How will I teach my students for at least the first six weeks. If I make a game plan for 6 weeks by the end of my vacation I will be happy. Let me break this down for you. That is 30 days of planning, respectively. That is 550 minutes per week for every grade level. 550 for 5th. 550 for 6th. 550 for 7th. My experience is that the average child behind grade level has about a 20 minute attention span. Sometimes less. So mathematically I must divide those 550 minutes in 27.5 blocks of time to be effective. That is 27.5 activities, lessons, or chunks of information for each grade level in both ELA and History every week. I first and foremost must take into consideration that I have a plethora of different disabilities and multiple intelligences in my classes. I have autism, ADHD (of course I do and I will rant later about where I think ADHD comes from), learning disabilities of all kinds, and behavior problems. I have no idea what kind of day these kids have had when they get to me. The crazy thing is that I can plan. But, it is only a plan. I can be mildly OCD when making these plans. I can have my whole 330 minutes of instruction for the day completely planned out. And it could fall apart. There could be a fight, a plumbing problem and the whole school smells like poop, my instructional time interrupted by an administrator that has other plans that supersedes mine. Or worse, the kids don't get what I am trying to teach. There is a communication breakdown. This happens more than I would like it to. Sometimes there is a lack of background knowledge. I think they know all of there continents and then I find out they think Texas is a country. I think they know what a particular vocabulary word means and they have no clue what the definition in the dictionary means to describe the word. Sometimes my educational background is too high for them and they look at me like an alien. Sometimes I spend a week teaching something. Losing sleep because my OCD self is putting all the cutesy things into my lesson and they all fail the test. So after I spend all the OCD time planning. I must then become a flexible person that goes with the flow. I must learn to breathe and be ok with making planning mistakes. I must show the students that I take responsibility for not attacking the lesson plan in a way that helps them to understand what I am teaching. This can be all very taxing on the soul. But, I have finally learned after 8 years that planning is everything. It is 90 percent of my job and it doesn't happen at work, usually. It happens today. I have spent a few hours looking at websites getting ideas. I have spent money ordering books. I have yet to make a journey to the dollar store to pick up supplies. I have yet to create nifty ways of keeping my classroom in perfect order for those 1,650 minutes a week I must entertain middle school students. It is entertainment. I am the actress in the classroom. I am the ringleader. I am the motivator. The counselor. My shirt is perpetually covered in boogers from the middle school catastrophe that causes a cascade of tears and hugs from me. I am the enforcer. " No, you may not make fun of someone because they stink of body odor". And then I must inform the smelly student that wearing deodorant would prevent this situation all together. Then I tell all the students as I lift up my arm and smell my armpit that "Ew. Ms. Cormier stinks today. I even forgot to put my deodorant on". Everybody laughs and the smelly kid is off the hook. Planning. All week for the next 6 weeks. 18,900 minutes of educational perfection.