It's dark these days when I wake up. In the rhythm of the semester, I seem to have found my equilibrium - early to bed, early to rise. I don't get much done at night (never) have and I've tried to listen more and more to my internal clock, my internal warnings. I do that during exercise, for eating, for drinking, why should I fight it any more for sleeping? But I watch askance as the minutes drift slowly backward - will it stop? First it was 7:30, 7:15, 6:30 - the sun in the windows on clear days was too bright, too warm, too inviting. I seemed pretty set around 6:30 for a couple of months but suddenly, inexplicably now in the darkening morning gloom of autumn, I am waking up earlier and earlier. And, as a result, going to bed earlier too. Today wins because today, for the first time, I accepted it and didn't force myself to go back to sleep or wait until "a decent hour". Today was 5:27. I am officially an old person.
I am having nightmares about my class. At first it was the back-to-school tradition, tied up with my own anxiety about taking classes. These anxieties might still be linked, but it's pretty firmly in the teaching category during these nocturnal visions. Two nights ago I was simply incompetent and things took forever - last night I had so many students and couldn't keep any kind of control. (Perhaps this has something to do with coming out of some weird attending-royal-weddings-trying-to-find-something-to-wear dream right before it. I really can't explain my brain. Oh wait - that sounds like a project runway dream. Got it.) The scary part is not that I have the dreams, but that in them I am attempting to teach the very thing that I intend to teach in my next real class period - and I'm doing it in just about the same words as I probably would in real life and it simply doesn't work. Am I failing at this? I doubt it - I have a lot of kids doing very well, but I have a few that I'm afraid of losing. One of whom might drop - but I feel so confident that if he would just come talk to me we could sort things out and get his grade higher. And (more importantly) get the material solidly learned. But I don't know how to communicate clearly the things that are so obvious to me by this point. I don't think about them - it's reflex knowledge. I suppose I ought to think of them all as very precocious kindergartners and keep it as simple as possible. And then go out for recess.
