Another bad night. Three and a half hours of sleep. Stress, anxiety, insomnia. After that, I was awake for hours, hours, staring at the television because that was the only thing I could manage to do.
Sometimes, you just have to watch TV.
But then, I felt a little bit of real sleepiness and I went back to bed and snuggled under the comforters. Yes, I sleep under two heavy comforters. I slept long enough and late enough that my stomach felt weird when I woke up. You know what I mean. I had that slept-in-the-middle-of-the-day feeling. It sucks. I also woke to vivid dreams, the ones that are so close to reality that they’re the most confusing ones you can have.
I dreamed I was in my last week at my old job. I won’t tell you the whole crazy dream. Dreams always seem so important to the person telling them, but not so much to the person listening. Don’t you hate when people try to tell you their dreams? I hate that. And yet, when I have a compelling dream, I want so desperately to tell someone. So, I’ll compromise. I’ll tell you a little bit which might actually be more annoying than when someone tells you the whole thing.
I dreamed I was trying to work the last couple of days at my old job. It was crazy. Don’t you hate when people tell your their dreams were crazy? They’re crazy because they are dreams, idiot.
So, in my dream, before I woke up, the students had split themselves into two groups, the ones who were trying to learn and the ones who ran circles around the room, screaming. They disrupted what we were trying to accomplish and I took a deep breath to figure out how to tell them to fuck off and stop bothering the other students without using those words..
Instead of being diplomatic like I should have been, I looked at the disruptors and said, “Get out! You’re fired. You have no intention of learning. You just want to keep these kids from learning too. Get out! Go!”
And I ushered them out the front door and locked it. When I turned around, I had a group of kids that actually wanted to learn from me.
That’s a little like what is happening in real life. I’m leaving the collapsing place where I used to work and bringing students along with me who I know are willing to learn. Really, the only criteria I had for choosing them was that. I could work with the ones who had trouble learning, even the ones who were diagnosed with a learning disorder. If they were willing to learn, I was willing to teach them.
I imagine that this will be the only time I will have this luxury in my life, as I end this old job where they are closing their doors and begin again with fewer students, the ones I get to choose.
I know there’s a reason for apathy in a student. I know that kids who disrupt a group of working students have a reason for disrupting it. I know these apathetic students deserve to be taught. They do. But, I’d rather work with the ones that are at least trying to learn something, anything.
My worst failure days were when I sat with a student who frittered away their time and accomplished nothing while I tap danced in front of them, when I tried everything I could to get them to look at the page in front of them and think, and I still failed because of their apathy. I swear, if it would make them try to learn, I’d wear a chicken suit and stand on my head during my tutoring sessions. The absolute worst days were when I was with one willing student and the rest of the room worked to keep us from working. I hated those days.
At Nick’s karate dojo, there was a plaque that read: Teachers can only open the door. It is the student who must walk through.
Walk through the door with me, please. I don’t want to wear a chicken suit and it’s hard to stand on my head.
Thank you for listening, jules