Last Year Next Year

Today I received my “Yippee for next year!” letter from my principal reminding me that I have just three weeks of summer vacation left. I know that to most people that sounds like the extreme luxury that it is, but still, in the big picture, my summer is wiling away!

I had one teaching dream this summer, and it wasn’t a good one:

Last year’s class was notorious. All of our feeder schools labeled the kids long ago as under performers and over offenders. It turned out, the year wasn’t all that much worse than any other year, although I certainly had some doozy students.

In my dream, I was starting this next year, with a group of students that in real life has been historically  wonderful compared to last year’s. But on my dream’s first day of school, things were absolutely terrible. Students were not cooperating, they were blatantly talking back and being disrespectful, and I was about to pull my hair out.

“These kids were supposed to be better than last year’s,” I thought to myself. “What is going on?”

And then I realized that I had caught on to the new class’s students’ names pretty easily–because a lot of my “new” students were my students from last year, all over again.

Thankfully, in reality if students are mandated to repeat a grade–which very, very rarely happens in spite of an exceptionally high failure rate among my students last year–they usually have different teachers for their second go-round.

So hopefully it was just a dream!