Cinnabar and Alabaster

nagging (although ostensibly already either solved or solveable--look, resident anxiousness, refusing to be logically quelled!) concerns:

• where the hell is rachel? i have a lost student--she's e-mailed me to explain, but then not shown up again. i understand things go on in their lives, i do, and i could leave her to sink or swim about it, but (a) i'm a worry-wart & too much of a nurturer, & (b) she's got a partner she's never met with on a project whose timeline is almost half over, & that's, as we say in the business , "seriously uncool." the good part is, jon, her assigned partner, picked a topic that another pair is already working on, so he's been gathering data with them. if she doesn't come back, i suppose i just have 2 groups of 3 instead of this being a purely partners activity like i meant it to be.
• all of my school football players are in the same group. anne says--we're on exactly the same page about it--that that's fine; they have the same schedule, they meet together in athletic tutoring, so it's far easier for them to do the work this way. i'm neither pampering them nor isolating them in any substantial way. it's fine. i worry anyway.
• the african-american kids in my class (i think they all are this time so i can call them that; last semester both of my visibly black students traced their roots to carribean groups, not africa at all) still mostly sit together at the far-end of the table from me. as a group (because visually all but one of them usually place themselves to create that designation) they'll move & mingle without objection when i ask them to, they answer when i call on them, they volunteer, they're with-it in the work, & they're openly interested in my input when i get the chance to walk trip around the tightly-cluttered little room to make it down there. everything seems a-okay. i shouldn't worry. but if someone were just to look in and not linger, it would look like we might have a problem. so while i don't feel like we do, i can't help but wonder if that visual impression isn't a problem in its own right.
• did i piss scott off on wednesday? is that why he didn't come on friday? and does it matter--not does he matter, but does it--should it--matter--if he's staying home because he took offense at my being busy? he's a grown-up. his decisions to attend class or not are entirely his own. i can not be responsible for what these guys put in, only for what i do, for the kinds of invitations i make, the kinds of guidance i offer, the space for experimentation & risk-taking & productive failure i create (allow? they have an awful lot to do with that creation too--and certainly the power to completely undermine my intentions if they so choose).