An odd occurrence for July...

As I was drifting off to sleep last night, I had a few things on my mind, most of which had to do with school. I was thinking about the kinds of things I could do with my students on the first day of school. The trouble with the first day of school is that everyone is getting to know everyone else, and figuring out how to get from one class to the next, and how to pronounce everyone else's names, so it's difficult to actually jump right into the content, although I think I am going to try doing just that with my World History kids. Nothing like a little map work to get everyone started.

Anyway, because that was on my mind as I went to sleep last night, I ended up having an anxiety dream about teaching. I generally only have those during the school year, and this kind of dream is the kind that I haven't had for a while. Most of the dreams I have had about school have been about particular students who worry me (as in I'm concerned for their future due to their performance in my classroom). In the first two years of my teaching, I had a LOT of dreams that were about my teaching ability...ok, well, they were really about me being an incompetent teacher, if we want to be frank about it. There was the dream where one ornery student would lead a rebellion against me, and encourage the whole class to leave the room, thrusting their fists in the air and yelling rebellious slogans. There was the dream where I stood in front of the class and had no lesson plan for the day, had no clue what we were supposed to be doing.

Well, last night was a doozy. It was a combination of the above two dreams. I was in a humoungous classroom where the sightlines were really poor, so I couldn't see all of my students, and there was a group of rambunctious girls hidden off in a corner, being loud and causing all sorts of trouble. I didn't have a lesson plan, and had actually forgotten EVERYTHING I knew about psychology (it was my AP Psych class, you see), and I think there was even another group of kids who were threatening to leave the room. It was such a traumatic dream that I woke up feeling very disconcerted. I think the thing that stuck with me was the complete and utter inability to remember the psychology, that I was standing up in front of these kids, a fraud. So when I did finally wake up this morning and remember the dream, I had to remind myself that I wasn't a fraud, nor was I incompetent, and that the scores my students received on their AP tests was an indication of that.

But why, dear readers, would I have this dream in JULY?