The drawbacks of summer break

This is what summer has made of me: a paranoid dreamer.

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. 

Highlights of the 2008 school year

12.  Having a 20 year veteran teacher with Specialist distinction come to me for advice.  On pedagogy, even.  Gosh.

11.  Finally getting it through to my Thai student, whom I taught last year as well, how to make subjects and verbs agree.  In only took a year and half to crack that nut.

10.  During a pre-exam fun quiz one student group named themselves Obama '08! after my bumper sticker.  They later confessed to seeking favour from the judge; they lost miserably.  I gave extra candies on their way out of class, though, for their gumption.

9.  - "Whoa, Miss, nice shoes!" (Indeed, I was wearing new shoes.)

     - "Thank you very much...who are you?"

     - "_____, Miss."

     - "Nice to meet you, _____."

8.  Tape a Co-worker's Personal Effects to the Ceiling Day.  There is still a Chupa Chup stuck to the ceiling 4 months on.

7.  After weeks of hearing, "Shut up, R!" shouted when I turned my back to the class (when in fact neither R. nor any other student was talking at all), I snapped.  

-T.: "Shut up, R.!"  

-Me, without taking my eyes off of what I was doing: "Shut up, T."  

-T.: "Touche, Miss."  

Satisfying, indeed.

6.  A very Catholic, golly-goshing Media Studies teacher sat in our shared office, along with me and a host of atheists, hard-out chain smokers and a flamboyantly gay teacher with a penchant for sparkly cuff links.  One day her "bring in a magazine" lesson during a print media unit yielded a skin mag thinly disguised as a car mag.  Not knowing what to do, she had taken it off of the student and brought it up to the office wondering if she should call the boy's mother or just throw it away.  The smoker, Mr. Cuff Links, and I raced over to her desk and had a hoot over the tawdry and airbrushed stuff.  Let's just say that jokes and comments were made, which were loud enough to be heard by the Head of Department one office over, and said HOD had to come in, take the magazine away and tell us to get back to work.  He never does this sort of thing, which leads us to believe that he still has the magazine.

5.  A young Russian-born man who struggled with syntax all year, waving from the doorway on the last day of class, shouting over the din, "Thanks for the class, Miss!"

4.  This same young man striding into my office the next week, only three days before the big exam, with four essays in hand.  He thrusts the essays at me with panic in his face.  "Will you give me some feedback on these?"  They were all awesome.

3.  After yet another discussion about why John Keats, and all Romantic poets for that matter, are fixated on booze, sex and the like, I heard a brief silence followed by about four kids simultaneously crying, "Aaaaahhhhh."  The dirty euphemisms had just gained substantial meaning and they realised that sex is more than a physical thing; it's often just a conduit for other more important ideas or relationships.  Therefore, all sniggering and fun was no longer allowed in class because it would make them look immature and stupid in the eyes of their peers.  I was witness to the death of innocence in some small part.

2.  Handing a student a battered copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest against his will, and then finding out through his speech project later that year that the book helped him better understand his relationship with religion.  He had realised not that he was an atheist, but why he was an atheist, and could articulate this for the first time.  I didn't expect this at all, seeing as Christian martyr imagery is so strong and (according to many) affirmative at the end of the book.  After his speech he thanked me for making him read the book.

1.  Hearing the guy who hired me tell me that he's awfully glad that he hired me.