T – Teaching – What a Nightmare!

T – Teaching – What a Nightmare!

Being a teacher, I have had lots of experience with kids. Over the 33 years of teaching, I’ve had good classes and not-so-good classes. I’ve managed to survive all those years intact and still enjoy working with kids and watching them learn. 

There is one particular class that I do hate the most. It was the most unruly, uncooperative, and mean-spirited class that any teacher would dread being part of. The only difference though, between this particular class and all of the others that I have taught and subbed in is that it doesn’t exist. 

I have this recurring dream, that I have been placed in this class and am left there with no support. The class is usually made of students I don’t know, but on occasion, there are kids from any of a number of classes that I have taught in that class. 

I’m always the one that is trying to teach a concept or some skill and never get the opportunity to succeed, for I am always trying to take power away from the students who control the class. They are screaming, throwing things around, running around the class, and usually confronting me with either taunts or total disregard. At no time do I get control and succeed at anything I’m attempting to do. Waking out of the dream is my only solace and even then, the memory of it haunts me for hours, before I totally forget the dream, as I do most dreams, as it fades away into the lockbox of dream storage. At least, until it crops up again, for this class can’t even follow the protocol of staying in the lockbox as a one and done. 

I had a lot of these dreams while I was a teacher. The weird thing about them is that I am still having them, even though I’ve been retired for over 14 years. On the plus side, they are less frequent. Now, the dreams usually involve me in subbing situations. 

This is not to say that I haven’t had any good teaching dreams. Those usually occurred when I was looking for an idea on how to teach something or I was remembering a point in my teaching career that I was successful and I came up with a new idea. But those dreams follow the dream rules and are one and done which means I can’t remember any of them.

This teaching nightmare dream may have different characters and situations but the actions are always the same, and it is the actions that I remember and the dread of going into those classes when the dreams occur. 

Luckily for me, for the most part, these teaching dreams have never become a reality in my life as a teacher…At least not yet.