Part of what I love about the job is the vacation time. Sure, it's inflexible and probably reduces my overall salary, but I love it nonetheless. I have extended time to work on pet projects, truly relax and explore books that I may or may not use in the classroom. I ride my bike and catch up with friends. I'm learning scales and modes on my guitar. My legs are now tan and sand fly-bitten because I go to the beach; life is good to us.
But at the end of the day the clock strikes 9 and I find that I'm not all that tired. I wait as long as possible to crawl into bed and still fall asleep quickly, as is the habit I've fallen into. It's here that I've been experiencing many a deep remorse, as Mark Twain once put it, in my dreams. Let me explain.
Because education and kids are two of the things our culture tells us we should feel an obligation to foster, teaching carries a certain amount of moral baggage. I've been told all of the good teachers keep their eyes out for 'teachable material' in their spare time, take papers home to grade, give up weekend and evening time to tutor or coach or cheer on the kiddies. And so on. So in that first week of my well earned (yet obligatory) vacation, I spent my time scrounging through second-hand book shops and libraries. I took down ideas and names and addresses in small notebooks. Granted, I treated myself to lunches out and some new summer clothes at the skads of sales I saw in every shop window. This blending of personal and professional time was expected, as it usually takes me a bit to wind down from the frenetic pace of work.
Skip ahead a few weeks. I now lay in bed, awake, and the sky is the iridescent grey-blue that appears just before the birds begin to clamor. The alarm hasn't gone off, but I am awake. I was wakened by those things that teachers normally dream of during the school year: loosing student assignments, forgetting class on the first day, walking into a classroom to find that your students are not the age group you expected and worrying that "I wasn't trained for this." Schedules were ruined, I had gum in my mouth when I shouldn't have, I was dressed for embarrassment, yaddah yaddah yaddah. But it's summer, and I'm not at work. Why the dreams?
My suspected reason: I'm spending my summer vacation researching the job shift from Auckland to any one of 5 locations in North America. Most of the family knows by now that my lovely husband is shifting careers, and is applying for graduate schools. This means that I'm making plans for job change come the middle of 2009. This doesn't worry me too much because we're, for the most part, moving back to familiar territory. I know the ropes of applying for work in the US, I've done an international move before and I know people in nearly all of the cities we're interested in moving to. But a move means that I'll be having two first days of an academic year, and for some reason that is picking on my sub-conscience.
So now that I have all of this time on my hands, I have time to worry about the future. My nightmares (they wake me up from sleep, so that's what they technically have become) almost always deal with first-sight sort of worries: first day of classes, first time meeting a department head, first time dealing with conflict in a new school. I think most teachers have had a few classes that never quite get off on the right foot, and after having a few of those in 2007 I'm extremely paranoid about having to dodge this bullet twice in 2009.
I guess I'll find out how long this dream pattern lasts. It may go away once we pin down where we'll be. It may ride right up to day one of classes in September. Either way, I'd much rather be having nightmares about flesh-eating shrimps jumping off the barby than dreaming about gum gluing my mouth shut at a job interview that won't come for another 5 months.
I almost wish I had the eye twitch back.
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