nightmares are relative, i suppose

Ask nearly any teacher about the teacher dreams. Their eyes will grow wide, and they'll nod slowly. They will recount the nightmares: Their classroom disappears. They are unprepared. They lose their lesson plans. They are possibly unclad. T–, their honorary student-from-hell, is—somehow—the principal. Their third period class pulls off a coup d'etat.

The nightmares often appear in August. Perhaps it is the moan of school buses, shuddering past the house on practice runs. Or the prodigious advertisements for mechanical pencils and Mead notebooks and My Little Pony Trapper Keepers. Something slips into the subconscious and worries the pedagogical nerves.

The nightmares lay in wait. I shouldn't have been surprised when they appeared last month, even after two years away from the classroom. Relax, I said, banishing visions of T– and gum-slathered desks. There's no school for you this year.

But that was before the brouhaha over the President's speech, which he will be delivering tomorrow to students across the country. I'll be heading to a nearby school, for one big voyeuristic round of watching-the-students-watch-the-speech. The brouhaha is a story for another day; tonight I'll dream of English class and brown bag lunches, not-so-secretly delighted that even this year, I get to go back to school.