Thursday, October 02, 2008

Moby understands

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.

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