True Confessions: Nightmares

I’ve written before about my teaching nightmares. One of my worst teaching nightmares is that I will oversleep and miss my classes entirely.  This usually results in my automatic firing (whoever heard of “tenure” in a nightmare?), utter humiliation, not to mention tons of stress on my part.

This fear is so real that I usually set no less than 2 alarm clocks to wake me up in the morning, even though I normally wake before either of them actually goes off. It makes no difference that I will probably wake up before I need to – I have to set (and check and recheck) all the alarm clocks to “wake me up” on time.  This obsessive compulsive alarm clock behavior is probably because I actually DID oversleep one time and woke up with only 20 minutes to go before school started. Luckily for me, I had just graduated from college and had the whole “get up and rush out the door to class” routine down to a science.  I made it to work on time, but only just barely. It’s a good thing they were just 4^th graders – too young to notice or care if their teacher had a bad hair day or not!

One time I woke up looked at the clock and freaked out - I was late! I was late! I rushed to get ready, showered, dressed and was making my breakfast when I looked at the kitchen clock. So certain that it was wrong, I checked another – they read the same time: it was 2:30 AM.  Somehow I had misread my alarm clock (or mis-set it, I’m still not sure what happened) – and woke up at 2AM instead of my normal wake-up time. 

I have had mini-freak outs mentally if I sleep late on a Saturday or vacation day, thinking I’ve overslept and will never make it to work on time.  Nothing like a good jolt of “Oh My Gosh I’m Late!” adrenaline rush to really get you ready to face a bunch of teenagers!