Stressful informance prep no matter the time of year

Wow! What a day. Three more practices for each class before our informances. I have always done these informal, informative performances in May which, as MCA testing has evolved, means we are prepping for a performance at the same time kids are taking high-stakes tests. Our schedules get messy, people are stressed, listening skills go out the window as does memory. On top of that, MAPs got added to the Spring.

So, this year I thought, why not circumvent that high stress situation by putting informances the week before the week before spring break? (No, that wasn't a typo, I do mean the penultimate week before break.) I thought it was a great idea and, yes, we are prepping informances with less frequency than usual (only seeing kids once a week now) which leads to less practice days (5 rather than 8--I always start prepping a month in advance knowing that it is a lot to ask kids to remember what we performed more than a month ago) but it has to be better that doing this on top of testing, right? It must be less stressful, right?

Apparently not.

This is what I've decided: Informances are stressful for me and kids no matter what. We want our presentations to be performance ready so we work really hard to make sure they are. This causes stress. We want to showcase our favorite and best material so we stuff the 50 minutes with as much as possible.  Students worry that they won't remember it all. This causes stress. We are either speeding through reviews and kids are being left behind or repeating something to make it really good which loses other kids who are ready to move on. This causes behavior issues. Stress coming out sideways. And at the end of it all, I wonder how much re-teaching I will be doing on the performance day despite all our hard work because, a) someone was gone the days we worked on this, b) they've crammed so much into their brains they forgot some of it, c) its been so long since we practiced some things they just don't remember it, d) they freeze once parents get into the room.

Maybe I need to take some stuff off the list.