Teaching Profession

Back-to-School Nightmares

By Anthony Rebora — August 25, 2011 1 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Commenting on our post about educators’ back-to-school activities, high school teacher Mary McConnell wonders if any other teachers tend to have anxiety dreams around this time of year. In a post on her blog on the Deseret News site, she describes her own annual sleep disturbances:

I woke up this morning in the familiar panic. Usually I dreamed that I showed up totally unprepared for a class that I'd never taught before. No syllabus. No handouts. No clue what I was going to say to my class on the first day of school. It didn't matter that this had never happened, and would never happen. The dream slammed me every August.
This year the dream did vary a little. This year I failed to show up at all -- stiffing the bright young man whom I'd helped recruit to my high school, as well as his two AP U.S. history classes, which I was scheduled to teach on Monday.

The odd thing is that I actually had a similar kind of dream last night: I was giving a presentation at an education conference and was totally unprepared. (Some might say this is actually not that unrealistic, but that’s a different story.) Maybe this back-to-school bad dream phenomenon affects even education writers/editors?

How about you?

Update: 6:10 p.m.: Well, here’s a different angle from EurekaTeacher, one of our Twitter friends:

@EdWeekTeacher In my dream I made soup out of a pot of water -- maybe it is foretelling how wonderful a school year I will have!!

A version of this news article first appeared in the Teaching Now blog.