Teaching Nightmares

Addition to Insomnia and Nightmares

Teaching Nightmares

In addition to sleep not coming to me when I lay down at night, I have another problem or two. Sometimes I wake up around sunrise, my head full of thoughts, and I cannot get back to sleep. In cases like that, I rise after less than four hours sleep, and I know I did not get the amount or quality of rest I needed. REM sleep is important for rebuilding of body and resuscitation of brain functions. However, if I’m up for the day, no nap will be included during daylight hours.

I hope that by the next night my body is tired enough to accept eight hours of sleep. About 50% of the time, I am fortunate to gain a good night’s sleep. Otherwise, I’m beginning a trend that robs me of any sharp intellectual edge I should have from sufficient sleep. This can go on two, three, or four days if I don’t get a prescription intervention, and effective sleep meds are getting harder and harder for me to find. Some nights, I lay in bed for six hours, trying just to relax and keep my eyes closed. That’s the best I can settle for some nights—and it is not restful sleep.

I’m developing a new recurring problem. This has happened two or three nights a week for several months now. I do not know what initiated my train of sleep thought, but I wake up breathless, and on the verge of tears. By the time I catch my breath, I’m crying. It’s always something about teaching in a school.

I never remember all the details. I don’t need to because the feelings I feel, and the feelings and opinions of others around me are the same.

*****

I won an award as a teacher of the month in the fall of 1990, my first year at Cunningham Middle School. I have been an outstanding teacher for some of my students, taking them home after school, tutoring privately for no charge, and I sponsored Student Council for a couple of years, as well as co-sponsoring cheerleaders, and representing the school as a Health and Wellness representative.

I always did more than just get the papers graded. I spent too much of my own money for kids’ supplies. I liked teaching, I liked the kids, but there was so much bullshit that went along with the job. Political directives from the administration seemed very often to often hurt me personally. The last year I taught was going to be the last year teachers were allowed to wear tennis shoes on the job. Shoot! My tennies are what saved me from leg problems like varicose veins from standing on my feet for 12 years. I was never a teacher who could teach sitting down in a chair. Eye contact is everything.

Perhaps it’s a problem I have with authority in general, because I’ve had the same sort of feeling about a personal banker or two. They treat me as if it’s their money, but it’s only on hold with them, and some banks don’t deliver very efficient customer service. I waited seven weeks for my debit card to be replaced, having to make the request at my local branch three times before the most important financial card I have was finally delivered. Frustrating.

Is there a sign on my forehead that says, “Misuse me, ignore me, I’m not worth your mediocre efforts to fill my needs?”. In my dreams about school, I feel empty, invisible, and less than meaningful. I feel like I’m considered a threat. And I realize that my unchecked emotional outbursts could become a threat.

In the dream that left me crying this morning, the principal had given me a full-face slap, for disagreeing with her during a faculty meeting. She slapped me, full across the face and I felt the sting, and she turned and went on with her agenda. The whole faculty saw what happened, there was a short “oh,” and things went on as she had planned.

I liked that former principal. She offered me the Drill Team position at a high school when I fibbed and told her I was quitting teaching because I was getting married. I was almost at one time during that year, but I knew it wouldn’t come to pass. I couldn’t tell my principal, and my friend, that I just didn’t have the drive and fire inside myself to tackle a big responsibility like that. I had burned out, again. However, it was a chance that I missed, and it was something that I might have enjoyed very much, except for the responsibility of seeing to that many pretty teenage girls.

The assistant principal spoke up for me in my dream, standing up and rewording what I had said so that perhaps a different set of words could portray the meaning I had intended. With the state of schools, and the faculty shrinkage of 2012 continuing, I am sure I was making a point about not being able to control discipline and teach if you have too many students—depending on the class between 25 and 32. I have had classes with 37 students, and I could not make it work. The assistant principal’s words made no impression on the principal, but maybe some other of the faculty recognized what I was trying to say. Nobody said a word of encouragement to me—not against the principal. This was a principal that you didn’t stand up to in public.

This was a day of leveling classes. Because of what I said, I knew I was going to lose my teaching job. I saw all the blue pieces of paper with handwritten schedule adjustments. It didn’t take long for the work to be done. Actually, it took a long time to level classes, because I’d once been drafted to help the counselors do that before, though I had not any special training at the time. It was learn as you go, and I did.

Another kindly teacher and the assistant principal came my way. They were smiling that smile that gets pasted on when you deliver bad news you don’t want to deliver. The classes had already been adjusted so that my services weren’t needed anymore. I had quickly been shuffled entirely out of the system, and out of my job—one I was trained for and in which I was well experienced, mostly.

I was let go for speaking out. And as I think harder on this, I remember than there was conflict over things not being clean. I couldn’t plan lessons, be on my feet in a classroom teaching, and be in another part of the school polishing and shining. It was all too much for one person, and I could feel that in the hard beating of my heart in my chest. It was all I could feel, and I couldn’t say anything. That’s when the real tears on my face started to form.

I was about to scream in my dream. I was going to scream out something meaningful, not mean. But the words didn’t come. That’s why I woke up breathless. I was being pushed aside, I was the unwanted, because I knew I couldn’t do everything that was expected of me. I didn’t want to quit. I just wanted to be accepted for what I could do.

I asked the security person to write up that the principal slapped me full face, in front of the entire faculty at a meeting. It seemed to me to be classified as an assault. You can’t let people physically beat you up with no repercussions. The security people were difficult to find. It was lunchtime then and they were eating, and not to be disturbed unless there came a fistfight in the cafeteria, or a food fight. They were in their own off-site world, in their own personal conversations, and wouldn’t give up any lunch time for my problems. They did not mix work with food.

I had to get back to the students that were probably already waiting in my classroom. I hate to be out of the room when students are there, because the teacher is still responsible if something happens. Some teachers can step out to the restroom without fears, but I never could, and seldom did.

By sixth and seventh period, even the kids were confused about which teacher and room they belonged in. They didn’t know where to go or what to do. My sixth period class disappeared to another teacher’s room, but I had received my seventh period set of students one hour early. What I’d been studying with the students all day, I couldn’t do. The kids didn’t bring the right language arts book for my spelling lesson. Only one kid brought his spelling book. The fifteen or so kids worked with me well on a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants spelling lesson. Then, in came an observer with a blue piece of paper.

I knew I lost my job. I wasn’t cycled down, I was cycled totally out of the business in one day. My working history, all the faces of all those kids, flashed across my mind. I was going to have to leave it all behind. It was because of a principal, and a principle-- something I stood for, something that was right for the education system. It didn’t matter.

*********

I did teach until about 1995. I’d only been diagnosed as bipolar for a few years, but I could tell that certain sixth graders could break my emotional shell. They could make me lose control of my emotions. There were a couple of wild ones each year that eventually learned how to push my buttons. That is when I felt I couldn’t go on in a classroom situation. I did actually loose it twice during my 12 year career. I was inappropriate while disciplining two students.

I had a 6-foot tall seventh grader once, named Ricardo, in my ESL class. He was grown man size. At the time, my classroom was in a hallway outside the deaf education classrooms. I always worried about body traffic, because three sets of classes passed through my room to exit the portable building. We found classroom space everywhere at that school. The next year I had a small ESL class that met in the janitor’s closet, and later in the day four classes shared the cafeteria. That makes it very difficult to keep your own students’ attention. Crowding was a big problem.

Ricardo took to jumping over the tables in my narrow room during student passing. In mid leap, I slapped him across the back, which was all I could reach in mid-table hopping height.

I told him to stop it. I knew what I did wasn’t right: I know not to lay my hands on my students, or any others. However, from his actions, I clearly envisioned deaf children falling down like bowling pins across my little classroom hallway of tables and chairs. I was trying to protect the greater good. He was in arms’ reach, and he was about to bowl down a handful of deaf students who never heard him and his commotion coming. He eventually told an assistant principal his version of the event, and I was reprimanded.
Nothing was placed on my permanent record, but I had enough eye contact with that assistant principal to feel badly about what had happened for the rest of my life. I really liked Ricardo, and we were still friends after that—but I felt different. I knew I lost it. That had never happened.

Several years later, in another district and another town, I had the misfortune of being a traveling teacher—I shared rooms of off period teachers. I had a rolling cart with my overhead, books, and daily handouts that I rolled about the school halls all day every day, traveling between classes along with the students.

Of course, nobody volunteered to help in any way when I had to have some painful planter’s warts removed from the bottom of one of my feet. I guess realistically, no one in their right mind, male or female, would be empathetic enough to give away their classroom. Traveling with the blue shoe made the daily path more treacherous and painful. I had one of those lovely blue oversized Velcro shoes attached to my healing foot bed, walking all the steps around all the school, for more than six weeks. Getting through a normal day was a tiring hassle.

At the end of third period, right before lunch, young Kathy had an anger fit at me for some reason, she assaulted me with what I considered a personal attack, and I had to react. She was perched to destroy the all the visual aids for my lesson for the rest of the day. My overhead transparencies for the day, and rest of the afternoon’s lessons, were hand written with a Vis-à-vis pen—meaning any liquid on my plastic pages would entirely erase my day’s lesson, consisting of more than a couple of hand written transparencies. Instantly, I knew if she acted with further malice, my lesson would be history. There was not enough time to put my visuals back together before class started again-- even if I skipped my lunch, which ended up happening anyhow. My lunch shift that year only had 25 minutes, including passing..

Kathy had my transparencies in her hand, and she headed to the door to walk out of the classroom and on with her life. She was still within reach. My hand went out to her hair, without my brain getting involved at all. Even now, I don’t think I pulled her hair. I think I grabbed it, hung on, and she kept walking—which caused her hair to be pulled. Okay, this is not a good excuse. It was what happened in the blink of an eye when my emotional flare took over.

I was livid and frightened. She could destroy my lessons for the rest of the day. She had something I needed badly, and I reached out to hold the first thing I could to keep her and my teacher paraphernalia from getting away. I got my transparencies back out of her hands, and secure in mine, as Kathy’s few friends looked on, perhaps in disbelief. They were her witnesses to what had happened, and they were all her friends. They didn’t even have to agree on a lie. The girls and Kathy skipped lunch and went straight to the assistant principal. I was called to her office as I delivered my discipline paperwork to account for the incident. Fifteen minutes of lunch was already gone from my 25 minute lunch period.

Having never dealt with a similar situation, the assistant principal was at somewhat of a loss to know what to do. She just kept saying to me, “I’ve never had to deal with a situation like this,” and shaking her head. She was a kind and fair level headed woman who later became a high school principal. She was the kind of person with which you enjoyed working.

I had no reply. I hadn’t been in exactly the same situation as before, but it was my set of emotions, firing off like an automatic weapon on a hair trigger. I caused an interpersonal problem with a student, and a problem student at that. Kathy and her brother had extensively documented reputations as troublemakers, but that didn’t excuse my behavior.

I told her I reached out for Kathy’s shoulder to stop her, and that my large ring was caught in her hair. The student onlookers wouldn’t verify my story. Luckily, I don’t think this administrator was a gossiper, so the story didn’t get all around the school. Her parents were informed, of course, but they knew their daughter’s behavior as well as I did. Kathy was transferred to another teacher, and that was the last I heard of this, though it’s stayed with me like a stone in my heart over the years. I wronged both kids, and it was because my emotions got the jump on my brain.

It happened, and it could happen again. Things in my life often come in threes. I left before I got my third strike out. That is why I left the classroom on my own after I was diagnosed bipolar. Nobody told me I had to leave. Not that many people at school knew I had an emotional disorder, as it wasn’t even fully diagnosed at that time of my life, though it would become a way of understanding life within a couple of years. I never know when my limitations will come into play.

I dream about school so often. I know I miss the kids. I don’t think I could ever go back to a classroom setting. There are those in the general population, both young and old, who thrive on the thrill of punching other people’s buttons, and watching the reactions they get. My learned survival skill is to stay away from people like that, and there are just too many of them, at any age, but especially in the overcrowded public schools of today. I don’t want to be a target, but I know myself.

So I lay down at night for restful sleep, and have administrative teaching problems during the night, problems with other teachers, but not so much problems with my students—at least in my dreams. They were never the enemy. Always the administrators, and peers with visions of grandeur in my dreams made me feel so worthless that I now wake with my eyes full of tears, and my heart half-broken for what I am not able to do anymore. Teaching nightmares won’t leave me alone.

It’s part of my life, my history, and I don’t know that behavioral therapy will help this particular situation. Nevertheless, how do I stop these dreams that start my day in an emotional panic?

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