First Posted: 8/29/2014
My back-to-school nightmare came late this year. In fact, with classes starting Tuesday, I began thinking I wasn’t going to have it at all. I was wrong.
There I was, as always in this late August dream, standing in the second floor lobby of the Advanced Technology Center at Luzerne County Community College. This is the building where my office is located and where I teach most of my classes.
I glance at the clock on the wall. It’s 9 a.m., so I know I have plenty of time before my 10:10 class which meets in the lecture hall right behind me.
I go back to my conversation with students and a few colleagues but when I look at the clock just minutes later, it has grown to a surreal size. It now fills the entire wall, a good 10 or 12 feet in diameter. And it shows 10:15. I’m late. Beautiful. The first day of the semester and the professor is late for class.
Wait, it gets better.
Not only am I late but I suddenly realize the class I am teaching is not in the classroom next to me but in a building clear across campus. Panic sets in. Even if I run, or perhaps take the car, I am going to be ridiculously late, but I have to give it a try.
Then it dawns on me that the class I am teaching is Chemistry 101.
“Chemistry?” I whine to myself. “Why did I agree to teach chemistry?”
“If it were a subject matter I know, I might be able to fake my way through the opening lecture. But chemistry? I need my notes to teach chemistry.”
Still thinking I can make it, I dash to my office only to discover the stacks of papers and notebooks typically on my desk are 10 times their normal height. I dive in but without luck. I find all sorts of things. A tennis racquet, a half-eaten slice of pizza, old Sunday Dispatches, Christmas wrapping paper, swim trunks, a Lone Ranger coloring book, but nothing resembling chemistry notes.
Then I wake up.
Okay, as nightmares go, it’s a pretty tame one. But still, I lie there all out of sorts if not in a cold sweat.
This will be my 25th year of teaching and I’ve had this nightmare every August. Most teachers I share it with tell me they have similar ones as summer races to its conclusion. We commiserate with each other. Oh, the cruelty of it all.
I have used my annual nightmare in an attempt to get sympathy from my friends who don’t teach for a living, i.e. who go to work all summer.
“Believe me,” I say. “You don’t want to have the whole summer off. The trauma when it’s over isn’t worth it.”
But I get no sympathy. Most of them just want to punch me.
Okay, the nightmare aside, having summer off is pretty cool. Hence the old joke: most people go into teaching for three reasons — June, July and August.
But — and please hear me out before you go rolling your eyes — summer off is not the best part of this job. The best part is the fresh start we teachers get each September. And each January as well.
The little nightmare I describe, while quite true, is just a function of knowing the close of summer means I have to start getting to bed a little earlier and begin wearing big boy pants and socks. It has nothing to do with the job itself which, to me, is about as sweet as a job can get. The recurring fresh start is a big part of that.
I function in a world of beginnings. And beginnings, for the most part, are marvelous things.
Beginnings are filled with hope and wonder. They are a tabula rasa waiting to be filled. And the possibilities for doing so are endless.
Since it’s a beginning, I go into every term determined to teach better than ever, to have more enthusiasm, more energy, more patience and more compassion.
Every beginning is another opportunity to strive for perfection. So I do.
I begin the semester determined to love each and every student, and more importantly, to do everything I can to get them to love themselves. I tell my students on day one that, no matter the subject matter, my ultimate goal is to help each of them to become themselves. You’re a version of you right now, I say, but only a version. You will keep becoming you all of your life, and my duty is to help with that.
The first step in the process is to get the students to also appreciate this concept of beginning.
Too often, some of them see themselves as hopeless. They got the impression in third grade that they were poor students and spent the next nine years proving it. But all that ends today, I tell them in the first class. As we begin our 15-week journey together, we are all brand new.
And being brand new every September tops having all summer off.
