Teaching: The job I loved, the dreams I dread

The good Lord and Paper Publisher Allen VanNoppen willing, I’ll celebrate 50 years in the professional workforce next June 14.

Right now, the numbers stack up as 31 years hanging around newsrooms in Covington, Ga., Morganton, Gastonia, and Morganton again. And for 18 years, I hung around classrooms at East Burke and Draughn high schools.

As I’ve noted before, I got off to a rough start as a 44-year-old beginning teacher with no training whatsoever. My first couple of months in the classroom were the most miserable period of my life.

But once I got my sea legs under me, I loved the classroom, loved my students, and loved the challenges and the successes that each day would bring. Today I can honestly say of those years, “Best gig I ever had.”

And yet, for as much as I enjoyed teaching and loved working with young people, nine years after retiring from the profession I continue to have nightmares about it a few times each month.

I worked for nearly 20 years at The News Herald and left under the most humiliating and gut-wrenching of circumstances. I don’t think I have ever dreamed of my time there.

Ditto for my other newspaper jobs. If Allen or Angela or Lilly have ever traipsed through my dreams, demanding that stories be written or that copy be edited, they left no memory.

And yet, in my dreams, I return to teaching again and again and again, and all of those dreams are bad.

I CAN’T GET THERE

At both high schools, I did the P.A. for numerous sporting events including baseball, softball, basketball, and both J.V. and varsity football.

The most challenging — and most enjoyable — of those duties was Friday night varsity football at Draughn.

Games started at 7:30 p.m. I was always in the stadium by 5:30. Checking the equipment. Getting my music ready. Making sure my notes and game script were in order. Consulting with opposing coaches on player name pronunciations. Chatting it up with early arriving fans.

A time or two I might have gotten held up and arrived at the stadium as late as 6 p.m. Never later. Still 90 minutes to spare.

Yet in my subconscious, time after time, I’m working in my classroom, I glance at my watch, and it’s 7:20 or 7:25. I have totally forgotten that the Wildcats had a home game that night.

Hastily gathering my notebook, I head out the side door. The stadium should be about 50 yards away. It’s not. Instead, I can see its lights glowing far in the distance, at least a mile away.

Trying to cover that mile as quickly as possible, I encounter swamps, thickets of poison oak, uncrossable streams, and, in the most nightmarish of nightmares, ravenous bears hungry for an all-you-can-eat teacher buffet.

I usually wake up thrashing in the dark.

WHAT WAS I THINKING?

There are mornings when I walk into The Paper’s offices with no clear idea of what I’ll be doing that day. I simply growl at people and look annoyed until I figure things out.

As a teacher, that would have been a recipe for disaster.

There was a reason I arrived at school before 6 a.m. each day. Daily agenda. Handouts. Tests or quizzes. PowerPoint presentations. Lecture notes. Writing prompts. All lined up and ready to go by 7:30.

Not so in my nightmares.

I arrive at my classroom just as the opening bell is ringing. It’s Monday morning. Time to start a new week. And I got nothing. No handouts. No agenda. Nothing planned. Nothing for my students to do.

Nothing.

As I stand at the doorway, shaking my students’ hands as they arrive, I look down the hallway and what do I see? Principal Emily Garrison coming my way, notebook and laptop in hand.

Billy Boy is about to be evaluated. And he’s got nothing. Nothing.

It’s at this point that Dinah shakes me awake, telling me I’m moaning too loudly for her to sleep.

OUT OF CONTROL

Once I got my feet under me as a teacher, I had very few discipline issues.

I was a man. I was old. I had a bit of a temper. Ninety-eight percent of the time, my students and I got along fabulously.

In the final division of my troika of nightmares, however, I’m in my classroom and things are out of control.

I’m trying to teach. Ain’t no one listening to me. They’re on their phones. They’re playing cards. There’s a couple in the corner making out like the Titanic is going down.

And I’m yelling.

“Sit down!”

“Shut up!”

“What is wrong with you people?”

Not one outburst draws any response.

Dinah shakes me awake.

“Bill, you’re yelling in your sleep!”

But why these dreams come again and again and again with the regularity of clockwork, I do not know.

Dinah, also a retired English teacher, tells me it’s because teaching is so inherently stressful. Students could be a pain. Administrators could be demanding. Papers to grade. Grades to enter. Long hours. Long days. Lots of weekend work.

Nine years out, I don’t remember much about the hassles and the pressures and the extra duties. But maybe my subconscious does.

Maybe that’s the bargain every good teacher makes. The memories we carry while we’re awake belong to the students, the laughter, the Friday night lights, the graduation hugs, and the moments when a young person finally “got it.”

The worries, the pressure, and the fear of letting somebody down get shoved into a back room of the mind, where they still sneak out now and then after the lights go out.

If that’s the price for spending 18 years doing work that truly mattered, I’ll gladly keep waking up to Dinah telling me to quit thrashing, quit moaning, and quit yelling.