Adequate Yearly Progress

by Roxanna Elden

On the last night of a break, teachers often reported similar dreams. Common themes included showing up to school in pajamas or bathrobes, waking up late, or completely forgetting how to get to the school, taking a string of wrong turns in unfamiliar terrain. Another shared nightmare involved schedule changes. In these, teachers learned they’d be teaching classes of several hundred students in enormous, irregularly shaped rooms, or on open fields where even the loudest of voices would be lost in the wind. In time, they would all settle back into their familiar routines. Their shared dread would recede as they realized they had not, in fact, forgotten how to teach over vacation. Still, on that last night they would all sleep fitfully, checking their clocks in panic and twisting their sheets into ropes. Most would wake the next morning in similar states of crankiness, powering through the day on coffee and adrenaline.

Even when it’s just a long weekend, like Thanksgiving break, I have nightmares and can’t sleep the night before returning to school.