You must accept that you are never going to come close to teaching your students anything more than a fraction of the language, in spite of what the College Board would have you believe in order for rapidly-burning out teachers all over the country to keep contributing to their coffers in the form of the AP Exam and other standardized testing programs that drive the educational system in place in the U.S. today.
You can never speak slowly enough, you can never relax enough in the stress cauldrons that our buildings have become, because your students will likely never hear – even from the most-talented CI teachers – enough language and never will in order for them to be sufficiently prepared for those standardized exams.
Look at your level one students. Even by October, they will have only realistically heard the language in your classroom for a total of about twenty hours, and that’s if you’ve been staying in the TL for a large part of the class period.
Keep in mind that, for modern languages, 10,000 hours of exposure are suggested by the research as necessary for high levels of proficiency, whatever that term means, and with only 20 hours in level one by October, your students will have heard the language only 0.002 (two thousandths) of the time needed, which is literally a fraction of what the research suggests.
(For instructors of Mandarin Chinese, the figure is 24,000 hours – more than double the 10,000 hours required for modern languages.)
From this we conclude that we and especially Mandarin teachers and teachers of other non-Roman languages can realistically do little more in our programs than simply try to get our students to want to continue on in the future with the language.
We must see things realistically for our own mental and physical health. Why, like the Tarot fool who strides with such confidence on the edge of dangerous cliffs, would you ever stress yourself out to such an absurd degree, trying to do something you cannot do – achieve some kind of score on some kind of test that claims (quite falsely) to accurately measure what children have learned in your classroom?