Teacher Nightmares

I always know when time draws near for school to start again. The nightmare begins. The first one was:

I was at school looking for the classroom for the new class I'm teaching. When I got to the room, the scene was chaotic. Men who looked more like prison inmates than students were standing around the room. A man was at the podium trying to take attendance. No one paid the least attention to him, or to me.

I left. My students were coming down the hallway. They were tiny in comparison to the tough characters in the room behind me, but we couldn't find an empty classroom. Finally I sat down in the corridor and began to hold class.

Last night I had another:

I go to find my office and have to use an elevator. The elevator is erratic and goes first to the 9th floor. Finally it goes down to -3. That's where the office is. I enter and find the tiny, windowless rooms are occupied. There are nurses there who are frantically trying to pack up there things. (Nurses??? Go figure!) I leave and come back the next day.

Next morning the office is freshly painted white. There are two rooms, only one has a desk the other two have beds. I'm trying to figure out how to put a piece of plywood on the bed so I can use it as a desk. Then I discover that the school is across the street. To get there we have to go to the 9th floor, then back down to the 6th, then walk out in the cold for about 20 minutes to get there.

This phenomena of nightmares before school starts is fairly common. At one point I considered doing a research paper on teacher nightmares. Usually mine are about losing control of a classroom: students throwing desks out the window, fighting, paying no attention to me.

I guess this year my anxieties are more focused on where I will be working than how the students will behave or misbehave.

(Just some collegues unfortunate enough to get in view of my camera!)