Caught Red-Handed!

Oh my, I'm such a jackass. I was teaching today and one of my students was saying something very insightful, I'm sure, about the chorus in the Bacchae - when I started to wonder how I was going to evaluate participation at the end of the term, ie how often should each person be expected to contribute to the discussion, especially considering that the class is huge, so maybe it's not reasonable to expect everyone to say something every day in order to get an A in participation, and maybe instead of daily participation points and average each day as an A, B, C, D, F or 0, I should just add up the term-total points...except then how could I take into account absences and punish accordingly (in my current system X number of points is an 97, attendance without participation is an 85, and an absence is 0) -

Suddenly my student was done talking and I realized I didn't have a clue how to respond!

"Yeah. Yeah. Um, that's a really great point." The jig was fucking up! "I'm sorry, I just had a space-out. Okay then, let's look at the previous choral passage and compare it to what we were just discussing..."

Inept cover-up. Admission of guilt. Quick, change the subject!