A Month of Sundays

When I first became a teacher, I heard one of my colleagues describe August as a month of Sundays. I didn't understand what that meant until I'd had a few Sundays as a teacher. Then it made sense.  

On Sunday, a teacher awakes with a mild sense of unease that grows as the day goes on until, by Sunday evening, it's a full-fledged case of dread. Sunday night often features "teacher dreams" - horrible  fantasies of unpreparedness and exposure. The class is totally out of control and the principal is standing in the doorway looking grim. All the parents are watching as you attempt to teach a lesson, naked. Your parents are watching.

I remember one vividly realistic dream in which I discovered I had apparently lost a student. It was during finals, and here was this name on the class roll, a student I'd never seen or heard of. The nightmare lingered even after I woke up. I drove to school feeling like something was missing.  

Not all teacher dreams are awful. Sometimes they're just funny. Jackie Kelley, one of my English department colleagues, dreamed I had asked  her and her husband to come to my Freshman English class to sing "The Iliad Song." It was all about Homer's epic, and it went to the tune of "Edelweiss" from The Sound of Music.  That's a perfect example, because teacher dreams resemble the classic actor's nightmare. You are standing on stage in costume, the theater is full, and you don't know your lines. You don't even know what the play is.  That's what teaching is like. You stand in front of a room full of adolescents who are waiting for you to entertain them.

Unlike a theater audience, many of them don't want to be there. Some are barely awake. Some are ill. All are distracted by fears and desires that are far more important to them than whatever is on today's lesson plan.  If you aren't prepared, it's like doing stand-up comedy in front of a hostile audience. You're lucky to escape alive.

During my first year, when I knew nothing about teaching and lacked any tools except my wits, I finished every class shaking and drenched with sweat, exhilarated if things had gone well, exhausted when - as was more often the case - I had failed to connect.  Things are much better now. I have some tools, I have some experience and, most important, I have some confidence.