Good morning! Wake up! You’re going to be late for school!
What’s that? It’s me, silly. Your mother! It’s August 26th, the first day of school, and you’re going to be late if you don’t get a move on.
Sorry, what did you just say? Oh, don’t be ridiculous, kiddo. You know what year it is. You’re twelve years old, and you’re starting the seventh grade today, and it’s just after six am. Your alarm went off, but I guess you didn’t hear it. Classes start at seven-fifteen and your bus leaves in half an hour.
Thirty-one years old and living in a far-off city? Haven’t been to school in nine years? Don’t have to be at work until nine-thirty and you usually take public transit? No, you haven’t done anything like that. Your curfew is nine o’clock sharp and you’ve got a lot of summer reading to fit into your rolling backpack today.
Honey, I don’t know what’s gotten into you this morning, but you’re just not making sense. You can’t just “drive yourself in late.” You won’t even be able to take driver’s ed for another three years, you’re only allowed to ride your bike while it’s light out, and you’re only allowed two tardies every semester. You’re not an adult who gets to grab breakfast at a coffee shop on your way to work. I don’t even let you drink coffee yet. You’re twelve years old, about to start junior high, which is going to last two more years after today. You have eight periods to get through today, each of which lasts fifty minutes, and you have two minutes between each bell to get from class to class. Don’t you remember? You have a few minutes to find your locker, then you have gym class first, then biology, then composition, then lunch, then Spanish I, then computer lab, then American history,and finally Algebra I. You go to all of those classes every day, all in a row, one right after the other. Then you do it again the next day, one two three four five days a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays you have ninth-period band, so you come home on the late bus, just as the sun is setting, so you get home after dark, so you spend your whole day inside while the sun is shining, so you miss all the sunshine, and then afterwards it’s dark, and then you have homework, and then you go to bed.
What’s that? You want to call Rebecca and get this all straightened out? Don’t be silly, sweetheart, you’re not allowed to use the house phone while your father’s using the family computer, which we keep in the living room, and only have one of. Also, remember that Diane and Briana are both mad at you, so their moms won’t be picking you up for their carpool anymore, and you’ll have to navigate that emotionally today as well. Use your cell phone? Honey, you know you don’t have one of those.
You must have had some pretty wild dreams last night, kiddo. Make your bed and be downstairs in twenty minutes, okay? And tell your sister to let you use the bathroom when she’s finished.
[Image via]
Tags: dreams, i am so sorry, it’s all happening again, school, you’ve woken up and the last fifteen to twenty-five years have been a dream
Hahahaha! You can’t trick me! School doesn’t start until AFTER Labor Day so that the local amusement park can wring as much money out of its student workers and visitors as possible! I’ve still got two weeks of summer vacation left! NICE TRY, MALLORY.
When I found out that there were people that started school in August my HEAD EXPLODED. Tuesday after Labor Day, always!
re-run this piece in two weeks and THEN the panic will set in
Likewise, when I found out there were people who still had to go to school after Memorial Day. Don’t they know that’s the official start of summer? (also, what the hell do you do after AP exams?)
Movies! Many, many movies. It was sometimes a relief when teachers tried to teach something, it was too hard keeping my place in so many movies watched in 40-minute increments.
Or the same movie in different periods so you re-watched parts of it all day but never got the actual ending.
“Steel Magnolias” for my school – I must have seen that movie dozens of times in my teen years. It could have been a lot worse, but I will never willingly watch that movie again in my life.
“Remember the Titans” for us. I grew up in Northern Virginia so it was regionally relevant, I guess.
I think that’s actually a punishment in Dante’s updated Hell.
YES!
The day before Christmas break, it was always A Christmas Story. I know some people on The Toast will love that movie until their dying day, but it will not be me. I don’t even turn on the tv during that 24-hour marathon on TNT or TBS or whatever.
I think that’s another one of those media artifacts that you have to encounter at a certain point in your life, or it’ll just never work for you.
Sooo many AP class movies.
We mostly watched movies and also spent a month writing joke essays
Watch a lot of Planet Earth, if I remember correctly. (There are people who get out before Memorial Day??)
Movies or “creative” projects. For AP Bio we had to make a video and ours was on the environment, and we ended up just filming really ridiculous stuff at our friend’s house because she had lots of land for her mom’s horses, and at one point her puppies drank from the “toxic” stream and “attacked” one of the guys. Basically, we filmed him in a puppy pile. It was amazing.
In AP chem we made peanut brittle! And also other weird chemical things (supersaturated liquids, or whatever you wanted within reason really). Also demos of thermite.
For our AP English class, we had the option of either doing a group presentation/essay, or doing a group project. My group decided to make a video of “tips” for studying for the AP exam. It was…pretty weird and hilarious. For one tip, we managed to rope the campus police officer into the video, and she pretended to arrest one of the guys in our group and throw him in the squad car. I don’t even remember what the related tip was. We also “hid” the smallest girl in our group in every single shot. I don’t think I had ever seen our teacher laugh so hard as she did when we played the video for the class.
Oh man, for my AP English project, we had assigned plays, and one of the options for our group presentation was making a theatrical trailer for the play. My friend and I invited a few other good friends over, and we spent the day filming a theatrical trailer for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.” And we “hid” the *tallest* guy in our group in every shot.
We had to do commercials in French class once. A group of guys who always worked together did a commercial for a French Viagra-like product. It was a parody of the Budweiser wuzzup commercials. They showed each of the four guys in different places shouting “wuzzup” over the phone, then gave the spiel about the product, and the final scene was the four of them in a hot tub with a bunch of girls saying the phrase “what’s up NOW?” I thought our French teacher was going to KILL them. They were lucky that she was only 25 or so and laughing too hard to get angry.
What I did after the AP Exams:
AP Statistics: We went to the library, picked anything off the shelf, used a random number generator to get a page and starting character, and then tallyed the frequency of each letter for some number of characters, and compared that to scrabble tile frequency/points. And then we moved on to more advanced math that definitely wasn’t part of the AP Syllabus.
AP Calc AB: Calc BC. So, we switched Calc teachers half of the way through the year, because our first calc teacher was dying (which we knew at the beginning of the year, and knew the department had scheduled things such that our calc teacher’s husband could take over when she couldn’t show up regularly anymore). She was a WONDERFUL human being, but he was a better math teacher, so I am one of the few people who thinks that integration is WAY easier than derivatives. Because we’d spent months figuring out stuff with his wife, we moved WAY faster with him, so by the end of the year we’d covered everything in AB, and at least briefly went over most of the BC syllabus. Not that I realized that until I got to college, took the class that was basically Calc BC, got to the end of the semester, and realized that it was 90% review.
AP Music Theory: HAH you kid none of us took the AP exam, the teacher gave up on teaching sight singing after day 3, so none of us were prepared and didn’t even pretend we were. After the AP exam, we dicked around in the band room creating 8 measure compositions with 4 part harmony we never played while listening to Bela Fleck or Mr. Bach Comes To Call.
AP French: Le Roi Lion (which we’d seen freshman year but now understood way more of it), and then Au Revoir Les Enfants, which I’d seen for a project years earlier, but most of the rest of the class was NOT prepared. She was the only honors french teacher in the school, so the entire second half of the AP French curriculum was an extended process of her tearfully saying goodbye to those of us she’d become really attached to– we also did a whole UNIT on Le Petit Prince.
AP English: Read Hamlet out loud. We were supposed to all be changing roles every class, but I ended up as Hamlet because I was way better at reading Shakespeare out loud than the rest of the class for the first couple classes. This was because a) I had been Puck in the high school MSND production in 8th grade, so I’d done Shakespeare out loud more than the rest of the class, and b) I had watched the first 20 minutes and the last 15 minutes of Hamlet (2000) (with Ethan Hawke and the modern olympic fencing gear at the very end) a dozen times, so I actually knew what happened in the first several scenes really well—– but had absolutely no idea about the middle of the play. None. I think I went home and read sparknotes so that it wouldn’t be TOO embarrassing.
You only have to go past memorial day before you were old enough for AP/IB sessions. Juniors with heavy IB classloads could count on teachers that looked the other way with attendance rolls, and Seniors’ last day was one week after exam season, for last-minute homework housekeeping. (If you were an exam-taker, homework schedules were probably flexible.)
We didn’t get out until late June (I vaguely remember my HS graduation taking place on June 24th) – but I don’t think our AP exams were that early. It was just business as usual, and then “finals” the last week.
After AP exams, you spend your AP History class periods experimenting to find the perfect timing for syncing “The WIzard of Oz” and Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”. (Answer: start the album at the second MGM lion roar.)
I convinced my AP Euro History teacher to let us watch Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure in our post-exam lame duck period, on the grounds that we could analyze it for historical inaccuracies. (I think he saw through my argument, but he let us watch it anyway.)
My son is taking AP Euro this year, I shall endeavor to retain this morsel for him. Thank you!
Time Bandits works for this as well.
“Little people…. hitting each other!”
I was the only person in my history class who’d seen Time Bandits before post-APs of senior year, which meant I was also the only one who didn’t spend the entire class period gibbering with terror and bewilderment.
Hey, we did this with Monty Python and the Holy Grail for World history class!
We once watched ‘The Breakfast Club’ in Religion class, and I’m still not sure why but I’m grateful. (Thanks, Ms Parham)
Honestly? Depends on the course. For AP European History and AP US History, those were taken in lieu of taking the Regents-level course. But you still had to take the Regents exam (in June), so after the AP exam you spent time studying anything that wasn’t on the AP exam but was on the Regents (e.g. the Regents exam is US History and Government, so we spent time on the Constitution and more recent history that wasn’t expected to be on the AP exam; in AP Euro we studied the Middle East and reviewed for the Global Studies exam).
In classes that didn’t have Regents exams? There was still a local final exam that you had to take, and sometimes that was given at the end of the year during the exam period, or sometimes in class closer to the AP exam. In Calculus I think we just watched math-related movies the rest of the year; in English we worked on final projects.
Also, we started on the WEDNESDAY after Labor Day. The Tuesday was teacher inservice.
We just got a schedule change so that the spaces where AP classes used to be were filled up with other stuff.
Yes, this was my experience. I think we had maybe a week after AP exams and since most of the non-AP classes had exams that week, we didn’t even have to show up to class. Got an extra week of summer vacation for being motivated. Who’s the dork NOW, bitches?
We started mid-late August and I used to think that was bad, but my friends who still live in the South had kids starting school on August THIRD.
Hooray, Virginia!
oh my God, there are still parts of this country where school doesn’t start until after Labor Day??
NYC doesn’t start til Sept. 9! Then again, we go until June 26.
It’s state law in Michigan. With snow days it’s not uncommon for school to last into mid-June.
In certain Virginia counties, there’s the “Kings Dominion law” where school can’t start until after Labor Day so that student workers/families can be at Kings Dominion (amusement park) during the Labor Day holiday.
EDUCATION FIRST, Y’ALL.
Yup, that’s the reason the law exists in Michigan. Tourism. Because that makes sense.
Iowa’s governor declined to honor any requests this year for school to begin before the end of the Iowa State Fair.
That really got my family off the couch and out to the fair, let me tell you what.
DEATH FIRST.
Guess I’m going to have to clear my morning schedule for this panic attack I’m now having.
May I join you?
Yep, I was about to reply that it was good to start my day with a panic attack.
I remember being so tired in 1st period that I physically couldn’t keep my eyes open and they would start to roll back in my head. My memory of that feeling is far more distinct than the memory of anything I ever learned in a morning class.
*meant as a reply to the comment below, intensedebate is being weird today!
I still get that in morning lectures as a postgraduate student. (They’re not even that early. I’m just not very good at being awake.)
I live in Australia and our first day of school is in February and I am STILL panicking.
Although my second thought was ‘right, if I HAVE to be doing this again may as well make the most of it. Family meeting, we’re ALL GETTING THERAPY and oh yeah, this time around I know I’m allowed to move out when I’m 16’
Why do they make children get up so EARLY?! We’re no longer bringing in the harvest at sunrise!
My high school started at 7:20am which is absolute nonsense, as I am incapable of stringing two thoughts together before 9. All this chronic sleep deprivation must be stunting children’s brain development somehow.
http://thewalrus.ca/time-for-bed/
It definitely is!
Same. I got home from school at 2 and napped until Boy Meets World came on in reruns at 5 pretty much every single day.
Thee actually is some research that suggests that teenagers suffer from having to stat the day so early (according to a health podcast I heard – I’m not an actual expert here!) . In the UK we don’t start until 9am – much more civilised!
I think there have been several studies now that getting up so early is really bad for you / learning. Yet there we are.
It may be bad for you, but it is MORALLY ELEVATING.
Especially for teens, because puberty mucks with your melatonin so that it is, effectively, four hours earlier for teens than for anyone else.
So basically we’re making them get up at 1am to go to school.
Mine started at 8, but they offered 7AM classes for the kids who couldn’t get everything in during the regular school day (mostly the high achievers). I had a friend who took calculus at 7AM. I can’t even walk a straight line before 8:30; there’s no way I could have done calculus then.
We started at 7:30, which I hated, but seeing as I had two hours of marching band practice after school every single day in the fall, I guess it’s best that we did. I was already at school until 5pm every day. Would have hated it if it was 7pm. Football game nights were bad enough.
My school started at 8 ish, but I was in choir, which was “period 0” and ran 7:15 – 8 am. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard sopranos trying to hit the high note in the Hallelujah chorus at that hour, let me tell you.
I think you might mean ‘you haven’t died, and gone to hell, until [etc]’
It’s for athletes who have practices and games after school. So, as with so many other terrible things in school, blame the jocks.
One year, some district officials interviewed student council members (mostly jocks) about whether or not they should start school an hour later. They all said no. All because they didn’t want later practices.
I nearly strangled some student council members, let me tell you.
Yeah, they should start school later and make the jocks get up earlier.
Not to go against the grain, but those jocks usually also had practice before school.
D: That sounds terrible! They didn’t have that at my school, but a lot of clubs had before-school meetings and programs (I assume so both people in sports and in clubs could do them).
At my high school, none of the sports teams had before-school practice, but every other activity met before school (we were a very small school, and if–for example–we decided that we were having play rehearsals after school, we wouldn’t have had enough actors to put on most plays, because at least 75% of the students were involved in sports or sports-related activities (like marching band)). So I had to be at rehearsals at 6:30 in the morning.
Oh man, our play rehearsals happened AFTER sports practices at like 6 or 7pm and would often go to like 9 or 10pm. I can’t imagine being awake enough to do anything on stage that early.
6:30 – 8 AM, 5 days a week, plus Sunday afternoons. (Which, because this was the rural South, meant that most of us went to church, grabbed something to eat, went to play rehearsal, MAYBE got dinner, and then went back to church. I was so glad my parents’ church didn’t have Sunday evening services.)
Pretty much only the swim team at my school had early practice, so I didn’t really have a whole lot of sympathy. I had afternoon practices too and they would’ve been much more tolerable if I hadn’t had to get to school by 7:30.
Our high school pushed the start time back 20 minutes, but only because our award winning history teacher/ championship winning soccer coach basically bullied the football coaches (who were winning neither teaching awards nor championships) into sucking up and dealing with it.
20 minutes made a surprisingly big difference in my alertness and general well-being at school- turns out those studies might actually have a point! Later start times for everyone! Down with football coaches!
Hey, now. Us band geeks needed it, too. We worked harder than any of those athletic-types.
I look back in horror at my 17-year-old self driving in the terrifying rush hour freeway traffic at 6:30 AM. Who let her do that?! On the other hand, getting out of school at 2 was the only way to have an after-school job that didn’t run too late for the child labor laws. I don’t know how you start school later without cutting into working hours.
Yes, I drove myself like that every morning for the last two years of high school. It wasn’t the longest part of my commute, but still, crazy.
I was repeatedly told it was to prepare me for the college “real world” where I wouldn’t be coddled… The one job I worked that had “high school” hours was a bakery and after that the earliest was 830… and even 8am classes in college didn’t require waking up at 530!
“This is to prepare you for the real world!”
Translation, in almost every case: “I can’t think of a good reason so I’m giving you one that you cannot refute by property of your age. If we were in any way interested in preparing you for the real world, the personal finance classes would have survived the last round of budget cuts.”
In the “real world” of college, I knew better than to schedule anything for myself before 10 a.m. If we’re being honest, even that was pushing it.
Only college class I failed was the 8 am Spanish. I was having a hard enough time being awake for it and then the earthquake hit & closed campus for a couple of weeks. By the time we were back it was too late to officially drop it, so I just stopped going. Much better to sleep later in my newly-certified asbestos-abated dorm room.
In order to fit all my AP classes I had to take early bird gym. As in before school. And it was the only coed gym class in the school. Putting on a swimming suit and getting into a grody school pool at 7am in the dead of winter to spend the rest of the day with wet hair was a cruel, cruel punishment for being an overachiever.
5am waterpolo practice at the public pool :/ I feel you. I also didn’t get to eat until 2pm because I had nothing but gym classes and band until then. Wet hair and no breakfast, yay swimming!
I had to take early bird gym to take a semester of journalism as a junior to ensure my lock on the editor in chief position as a senior. In so, so many ways, not worth it.
Whenever I don’t sleep very well for a few days and go to my office job with that familiar heavy-lidded eyes kind of sleepiness I get visceral flashbacks to pretty much every single day of high school and am always aghast at how I was expected to get anything done or retain any information in that state. I acutely remember the amount of concentration it took too keep my eyes open in English and very little about The Odyssey.
I was once so deliriously sleep-deprived that I started giggling uncontrollably during Calculus for absolutely no reason. I had to excuse myself to the hallway and crouch down against the wall to calm down. I still wonder what that teacher thought I was laughing at…
The bus arrived at my driveway at 7:40 – 7:45 am. (If I opted to walk I had to be out the door by 7:30, as it’s about a 20 minute walk to the high school from my house.) Homeroom during my high school years was at 8 am, first period began at 8:20. School got out at 2:45 pm.
My alarm went off at 7 am (sometimes 6 am if I needed to get in the shower), and even then it was a struggle getting out of bed some mornings. Being a night owl didn’t help.
(And some schools here still take up to three weeks off for potato harvest in September/October.)
I picked my high school specifically because it started later than all the others, at 8:30.
(I was still late every day).
My junior high and high school both started at 7:45 and got out at 2:15, because parents could be home to get the elementary school kids off to school and then we could be there when the little kids got out. At one point, I had school dance team practice at 6am (because basketball and wrestling got the gym after school for practice), then 15 minutes to change and get ready for class at 7:45, then get out at 2:15 and immediately drive to my 3pm after-school job four days a week (which was thankfully only a three-hour shift), and then get home at almost 7pm. So I’d be out of the house from 5:30am to 7pm and GOSH I DON’T KNOW WHY TEENAGERS SLEEP ALL THE TIME.
My middle school started at 7:35, which meant my bus came anywhere between 6:15 and 6:45 depending on that year’s route, so I was SO EXCITED for high school to walk to high school at the almost-civilized hour of 8am.
Then we moved to a new district (new state, but that’s pretty irrelevant) to a house five miles from school – that is, the beginning of the bus route – and where the high school started at 7:20. I still haven’t really forgiven my parents for that.
…i broke out into cold, cold sweats just reading that.
I love being an adult.
*holds tightly to cubicle walls and office coffee maker as if they are the only thing tethering me to this, the glorious, autonomous, caffeine-and-alcohol-fueled present*
Noooooo, I saw Mallory say on Twitter last night that she was writing something really mean for this morning and this is worse than anything I could’ve imagined.
*shudder*
True story, I woke up at 4AM and had trouble getting back to sleep, which is unusual for me. Lying there, I wondered if it was having read that tweet from Mallory right before bed.
I had a nightmare last night that I was in math class and had somehow missed the first day and didn’t know any of the answers to the questions the teacher was asking. And then this morning, I sat next to a young woman on the bus doing her math homework. and now this!
Why is it always math class? I haven’t taken a math class in eleven years. Yet I still have horrible nightmares about showing up to math class and realizing I haven’t attended all year, haven’t done any of the homework, and there’s a big test today. OH NO WHAT DO I DO?!
Also, weirdly, it’s always a college-level class in a building based roughly on my high school. I don’t know why that is.
Always a math or science class. ALWAYS. I have this dream several times a year!
I had a reoccurring “you haven’t attended this class all year!!!” dream that was SO VIVID that I still sometimes think it was real. The only thing that’s convinced me it’s not is that they let me graduate, so it must not have been a real class.
I have dreams where they track me down and claim I have incompletes for everything past geometry and if I don’t finish them RIGHT NOW they can take away all my college/grad degrees. And I always completely believe that’s a thing that happens.
Me tooo. And often I “discover” the exam/homework/missing credit while backstage for a play (I have such stage fright omg) in which I have to tap dance or wear a unitard or something.
I once had a history class missed exam dream and was like HA HA SUBCONSCIOUS I GOT THIS.
But yes, usually math.
Aw, your subconscious was throwing you a bone, how sweet!
Yes! I have this dream every spring. This exact dream! What the hell?! (I am 30, and also I stopped taking math classes after my sophomore year of high school, so it literally has been more than half my life since I have taken a match class.)
My grandfather was a retired professor. He once told me that not only do the missing class anxiety dreams never go away, but IN ADDITION, if you go into teaching, you get the “OMG I forgot to grade the papers and they’re all due back this morning” anxiety dreams.
Why is it always math class?
Because that’s where it actually happens.
wtf, are you me?? The only recurring dream I have is the “I have a final today for a class I never attended” (usually math, but last time it was history!). It’s getting really old. Every time, my brain is like “How could you have let this happen?!”
For me, it’s always gym class. (Mostly that I haven’t taken it all year and I can’t graduate).
I get dreams like this all the time, but it’s a college class I realize I haven’t attended once the whole quarter, and forgot I was enrolled in, and there is a test today.
yes, exactly! It’s so detailed that I even dream looking at my course schedule online, seeing a class, and saying “I didn’t know I was enrolled in that!”
I was pulled out of high school when I was 14 due to illness, and I keep having these dreams where I go back to my old school and everyone just expects me to have caught up on all the work I missed. I always seem to start in a class with all my old friends and then just follow them to their next class and don’t realize until the teacher walks in that I don’t actually belong in that class, but it’s too late and the teacher is already yelling at me and I don’t know what to do, and then I wake up. I’m breaking into a cold sweat just thinking about it!
Daaaang, that bites! There must be some way to exorcise this…
I have that dream about French class and the test is on ordinals (first, second, etc.) and I don’t know anything and I start crying.
I have a master’s degree and a professional job in my chosen field and once a month I have a dream that I somehow completely failed to attend a required math class in undergrad (last week’s twist was IN HIGH SCHOOL) and thus all my schooling since was invalid and I lost my job because of it.
I’ve had this dream since I finished my undergrad degree, so thanks for the last five years, jerkbrain.
I do indeed still have dreams once in a while that I’m in school and wait, I have what class now? Where is it? Ugh, which one is my locker? This school doesn’t look anything like I remember. When did it get so big and confusing?
Yes. Mine also invariably include “I cannot remember my locker combination, and class is about to start.”
I can – and I am 45 years old – tell you that my high school locker combo was 14-32-44. I will never, ever forget that.
Also my measurements!
(I am a traffic cone).
I read someplace that the part of your brain that deals with numbers is inactive while you sleep.
Which I guess explains why so many of mine involve trying (and failing repeatedly) to open a locker, dial a phone number, etc.
This was my life. After frantically rattling my locker door once too often, I got the biggest backpack I could find and took ALL my books EVERYWHERE with me. Screw lockers.
“Haven’t you been to class?”
For the longest time, my go-to anxiety dream was “It’s the first day of school and I don’t know my class schedule.” Uggghhh,
I’m still having this dream. I can’t remember my schedule and I’ve lost all the copies I’ve made and I’m doomed.
Always the schedule and the lockers and the room numbers, the little administrative details that got you into so much trouble and embarrassment (whether actual trouble or just your own brain going “why are you so stupid, everyone ELSE figured it out”)
And then I wake up and think “I could have just gone to the office and asked and solved this whole problem,” which now seems totally reasonable, but probably would have be AGONIZING to teenage me. Not that I ever had any trouble remembering my schedule or my locker combo. Oh, brains.
You know, I have a LOT of anxiety dreams and the class thing isn’t one of them and I think this is why – I know how to find out, now. Which is nice to realise because a lot of my younger-me anxiety was about just never knowing what was going on or how to find out or how to ask without demonstrating to everyone that I was a clueless idiot.
I did have a recurring dream that I would be late to an exam, when I was in uni. And then, one of my last exams was on a different campus and they changed the building at the last minute AND there was a parade on AND I was ill and dizzy, and I missed the exam and had a very public meltdown about it. Luckily I was genuinely sick and could get a certificate for missing it and it was a small class so they rescheduled me to do it the next week. But man. That was not a good moment.
Mine is always that I haven’t been aware all semester that I’m supposed to be taking math and now it’s finals and I have no idea what a math is. Kind of mean that algebra can still stress me out after 20 years.
I have a variety of recurring school nightmares and they always take place in the same building, which does not remotely resemble any school I went to. I can imagine it in perfect detail, from the basement level with the low ceilings and orange chairs to the upper levels which have tons of criss-crossing staircases and sort of resemble a shopping mall. I think this may be where I will go when I die?
Your school dreamscape sounds startlingly like mine. Perhaps we’ll both be there?
Maybe we are about to discover that we’re sensate.
That sounds great but just to warn you, my bathroom is kind of gross right now BUT I’M GOING TO CLEAN IT SOON so don’t be alarmed. I also have very strong legs if that is of any use.
That’s what I always say about my bathroom too…
ALWAYS
la la la la la I’m not listeniiiiiiiing~
I used to always have the same dream school building (a mishmash of my elementary school and jr/sr high school) but in the past few years I’ve gotten a new dream high school, which is sort of a blend of my high school and a mini-golf course and a park, which is weird because I spent very little time outside in high school.
Mine is always it’s the end of the year and I have completely forgotten to go to one of my classes all year, and I don’t know where the class takes place, and now I’m going to have to explain this to my parents.
The weirdest part is that most of the time it’s history class and a tiny part of my brain recognizes this and quietly thinks “don’t I have an MA in History?” but it’s usually not quite enough to wake me up.
Also scary is that my dad has the same exact dreams about forgetting to go to class or failing and he is 71 years old. He says his tiny voice of reason tries to remind him that he’s retired and has a pension, but it also doesn’t wake him up.
I have actually realized in the middle of a back-in-high-school dream that, “Hey, I have an MA! There’s no reason for me to be here!” and announced as much to the teachers … and they still won’t let me leave!!!
That’s what’s so terrifying about K-12 school! Logic has no effect. It doesn’t matter if you know everything already or have a sense of self, you’re trapped! And subject to pointless rules and the whims of seemingly all-powerful adults and reasonless peers.
The lack of autonomy is just awful.
(side note: I love your user name!)
Mine is that I didn’t realize I was taking a class and it’s the final that day and I haven’t been all year.
It doesn’t help that I actually once walked into the psych class I had skipped two days of to find we were taking a test that day and I had forgotten.
Yes. My particular one is “first day of school, and there’s still enough time to get to class, but I forgot my schedule at home and there’s no way to know where the classroom is”
But then I get there and even though it’s the middle school building, I have to decide whether to add/drop based on syllabus day. Except it’s also no longer add/drop period and I’m always in the third semester of engineering-major waveform math-physics, and I missed the first several sessions of class.
Which is to say, this time Mallory’s eldritch horror missed me by a few inches, and as long as no one mentions that “reasons I won’t be coming to work today” post… shit.
Mine are almost always that I have to go *back* to high school, because I am one class short or something, and they will cancel my diploma which will, domino-like, topple my college degree, etc. etc. And then that I have somehow kinda sorta forgotten to go to class all semester (I berate myself for this, in the dream, because in real life I was *really* *good* at school), and it’s finals today and everyone will be laughing at the thirtysomething who’s not only still in high school, she can’t even hack it, and…
Interestingly (to me), I never had school dreams until I was out of school myself.
This is mine. Or even worse I have to go back to middle school, uniforms and all
Mine are always photographic reproductions of my high school’s insanely overcrowded hallways. (Courtesy of poor local planning, my HS had about 2500 students enrolled and was built for about 1200. Loads of fun if you’re on the small side.) When my school finally got a web page, I investigated and discovered to my horror that the top graphic was a GIF of someone walking down a hallway GoPro-style. I screamed and closed it as fast as I could.
Mine is always that I’ve forgotten to wear shoes to school, somehow, and I’m wandering the halls, terrified I’m about to get in trouble 😐
If only it were ONLY shoes…. *sigh*
I have a terrible sense of direction, and have a lot of dreams in which I am walking around and around a place vaguely like my high school, and only ever can find the swimming pool and the locker rooms. The rest is just endless halls.
Well, okay. At least I’ll have this new package of pens (bic, medium point, black) to console me.
I got a set of folders: blue with a yellow line around the edge, yellow with a red line around the edge, and red with a blue line around the edge. But the line colors inexplicably don’t quite match the other folders.
The new pens. The new pencil box. The new paper. The new folder.
The illusion that this year would be different, better, everything that I’d dreamed of.
No, I’ll be fine. Eventually. I didn’t take a coffee break this morning, so I’ll just curl up in a ball under my desk for a while.
This is how life-long stationery obsessions begin. Life throwing you a pile of crap? Need a mental reboot? Buy new pens and notebooks and everything will be fine!
Yep. What can I change today? (Not just start to change, but change completely.)
– my approach to relationships
– my physique
– my job
– switch to a gel pen
This explains my problematic “buy all the Field Notes” compulsion.
(In case you need to rub your face on some notebooks, too: fieldnotesbrand.com)
Everyone in my high school used eight-pocket folders, and I would decorate mine with pictures I cut out from magazines, and photocopies out of art books, and quotes, and rubber stamps. That was an upside to the start of the school year.
Part of me finds this terrifying, but… man, with the improved social skills, dress sense and study ability that I have now, I would be a far more successful teenager than I was the first time around. Plus, today my mother drove me to work, and I’m currently listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks, so I’m not sure how far I’ve actually come.
Yeah, redoing the social part wouldn’t be bad but I would be feeling so trapped if I had to keep to that schedule.
I too have put some serious thought into what my plan would be if I found myself in this time travel situation. Relearning everything I forgot about math would be torture, but I would be a much cooler and less stressed out teen the second time around.
I know I can do SAT level math, and, if I conduct my life similarly the second time around, that will be enough. I grew up in/went to school in America, but read too much British literature and went to university in the UK, where their admissions requirements are different, and relied almost entirely on SAT and AP scores, as well as just checking that I was getting a high school diploma. So, that would be fine. I’d just need to PASS math and science, possibly learning a bit more chemistry, and then just do a bit more studying for US history and Latin, so I wind up with better AP scores. Then when applying to university, I’d apply to the English department, not history, so I didn’t have to wind up switching everything.
Then in the first year of university, I’d start doing theatre right away, and I’d try to get through that biblical studies course.
I’ve thought about this before. Mallory can’t scare me.
I think that’s the thing – I’d already know I COULD do it. Actually I’ve been reflecting lately that although I am better at being a person in the world now, I miss being in school and knowing more about things. Like… it seemed so IMPORTANT to know how rainforests work, and the water cycle, or how DNA is arranged, or whatever. And now I’m at the stage of life where I kind of remember sort of the shape of how things work, but I actually know almost nothing. I miss those things.
High school social lives are wasted on the young.
Your adulthood social skills work on fully formed humans who can feel things other than lust and spite, they will not save you
If I could go to school in the internet age? Had fanfic and places I could talk but still be anonymous? Way better than graduating in 1988, for sure.
Agreed. I would have done a much better job at being a teenager if I’d been in my twenties at the time.
Good thing I’m still a total dirtbaaaaag
I keep hoping maybe I’m meant to be really good at being 40.
I feel like I’ve ALWAYS been really good at being 60. I’m just waiting for the rest of me to catch up. (And trying not to forget to do things so that I have good stories later)
I want to believe that. But I’d still be me, with the same body and living in the same household, and I’m not sure that I’d want to have to put up with high school and all the attending bullshit again, even with the hope that I might have the guts to go out on a few dates and the motivation to do a bit better in school so that I could go to a first-tier state university rather than a second-tier one.
Oh man I guess it’s real important not to discount how physically terrible puberty is. Just before I ovulate (thanks, period trackers) I feel like about 10% of puberty hormones, and it’s TERRIBLE.
I have spent a not insignificant portion of this workday now wondering if it would be morally wrong, in this scenario, to make out with high school boys.
I have concluded that it would be morally wrong not to. Think of all the good one could do for their future girlfriends.
I do sometimes wish I could go back to high school with my adult mind just so I could not give so much of a shit. Like, another kid says something shitty and I’d just laugh. Or a teacher tries to be all serious and you’re like, “Pfff, this is all a charade,” and you pronounce it “sha-rahd”.
And you write papers that are so good the teacher doesn’t even feel worthy of grading them.
ETA: Truth be told, even in high school sometimes I’d get an A- or B+ on a paper and think “This teacher just isn’t sophisticated enough to GET me.”
Mallory, this piece should be outlawed by the Geneva Conventions.
Mom? Mom, wake up.
Mom, it’s time to take your pills. No, Mom, think. You know what year it is. It’s not time for me to go to school, no. You have a busy day with your therapist, Carol. You remember Carol. Of course you do.
Are you sure she can hear me?
Mom. Look at me.
Way to beat Mallory at her own evil game. Hope your soul was worth it :/
No, Mom. Carol, not Mallory. Mallory has been gone for a long time. This is Carol, your therapist. Carol.
….where did Mallory go??
Is it okay to tell her? Alright.
Mallory… is still back at the old office. You haven’t worked there since I was a kid. Come on, Mom, just open your eyes.
Please.
Um guys are the rest of you viewing this crime against humanity right here??
Oh god, I hate it when she gets like this. I know that’s not her, really, but still… I can’t do this.
Guess what, kiddo? It’s genetic. So have fun with that.
Now you and Carol fuck off and let me go back to sleep.
OUCH.
nope.
I think I’m going to throw up.
Also I am PRETTY SURE I wasn’t planning to have kids, so… SO THERE?
What is UP, anxiety attack? I wasn’t expecting to see you in this comments thread!
DID YOU GO TO MY HIGH SCHOOL?? Because most people I have met as an adult are appalled to hear that I had to catch a 630 bus for a 715 start time because they apparently went to more humane schools.
Man, my school too. My bus took forever to get to school, because it picked up all the kids who lived in random neighborhoods & developments outside city limits. There was one glorious year (I mean, eleventh grade was not that glorious, but it was good in this respect) when I was sixteen, and school started at 8:20, and I could drive myself, and I could get up at something like a reasonable hour. Then the next year they moved the start time to before eight o’clock.
I had a 7:15 AM start time in HS, too. Every morning was torture.
8:20 start time, unless you signed up for zero period
Zero period sounds hilariously ominous- did it make your start time earlier or later?
Earlier! Which makes it exactly as ominous as it sounds. It happened before first period, as it was mostly there for people trying to take a full-IB load, which sometimes meant seven classes in a year instead of six. (Or it could leave you room for a study period or early dismissal.)
But the rest of us looked upon it with the appropriate degree of horror.
I did this on purpose! The upside is I took enough classes that I graduated a semester early and my last semester was only grade twelve math and English as required by the province, so I took them at university instead. Buy uggggh waking up so early for school was a nightmare that now I onlynsign up for work shifts starting at 11am or later
Yeah, there were lots of excellent shenanigans to be pulled with ones schedule, especially as an upperclassman, where the benefits certainly could outweigh the drawbacks. I took four classes senior year and was done by lunchtime (which helped support my 25-hour-a-week Constitution Team habit), while another friend took his full courseload as an enrolled student at the local community college, meaning he got to transfer into state school with almost enough credits to be a junior while the rest of us were applying to be freshmen. And the uber-smart queer kids graduating a year early with a few credits by correspondence in order to get the heck out of Institutionalized Everything Land.
Telework, though. Wake up at 8am to be on the clock by 830. Never have to look one of the nonsense ex-military morning people in the eye when they’re already taking their lunch shift by 10am or whatever insanity they’ve invented for themselves, ugh ugh ugh.
“uber-smart queer kids graduating a year early with a few credits by correspondence in order to get the heck out of Institutionalized Everything Land.” basically my rationale, though I’m not particularly smart, just good at charming teachers.
Downside of the 11am shift is I don’t get done until 8 or later, but it’s so much better than waking up before the sun! Highfives!
yup, 7:20, and it was a magnet school in the southeast corner of the county that bused smartypants magnet kids in from the wealthy northwest part of the county, and the traffic was awful, and my mind still boggles at how my parents were like, yeah, sign us up for this!
Nothing in my adult life–not even the TSA, or the DMV, or tax paperwork–has ever come close to filling me with as much bleak despair as the experience of looking up at the clock in first period Chinese class and realizing that it wasn’t even 8:00 am yet, and that I still had to put up with another six hours of this.
(Although now I think about how wonderful it would be to get to take Mandarin, and I’d totally be down with taking a 7:30 class, because I’d get up so early, and then roll right on to work, all enthusiastic and keen and doing something cool, so I think the real problem was being 16 and the crushing knowledge of having zero control over my own life.)
My high school started at 7:50 and I had to get the bus between 6:45 and 6:50 because I lived as far from my district’s high school as it was possible to and still be in said district. 40 minute bus ride at least. THE. WORST. Not to mention that I hated riding the bus on principle anyway.
In my senior year I had a car and a license, and then they changed the start time to 7:40, which meant I could only sleep in until 6:45 if I was planning on showering and stuff in the morning. I was bitter.
Man. I do not miss high school at all. My brother started his junior year yesterday and I was like “HAHA, SUCKER.”
I went to private school so I took my local bus to the district high school and then another bus to my school, which took an hour. On the way home they took everyone in my district back in one trip but they always dropped me off last, so it was another hour. I now live seven minutes from work and it is glorious. I used up all my tolerance for commuting as a teen.
I went to one of those progressive experiment high schools where you had some degree of freedom over your schedule, like you could choose to take a class instead of taking a free period (most people filled these with extracurricular or clubs, our drama club was award winning and Very Serious) I always put my free period and made it the first class of the day so I could come in 46 minutes later and since I basically lived next door to the school this meant I got an HOURS MORE SLEEP WONDROUS LUXURY.
A time management
ETA: it’s eating my plus signs, but there’s supposed to be three!
7:21 am. I have such vivid memories of watching that 0 turn to a 1.
As an OCD-haver, that really bothers me. Why not just make it 7:15 or 7:30??
it’s a psychological thing! When you give odd numbers like that, people are more likely to stick to them.
I had to get out the door at 6 so I could drive the half-hour to school so that I’d be able to miss the hour of traffic that would appear if I waited even another half hour, all so I could be on campus an hour early for our 7:32am start time.
At least the extra hour meant I always got parking?
Is this serious? 7.15?? This must just be an American thing right? That’s HARSH. The countries I’ve lived in, school starts at 9am and finishes at 3pm. Anything earlier is pretty much torture I reckons. Who can learn ANYTHING at that time??
I frequently dream I’m back in 8th grade. In these dreams, I remember I have a Masters degree, but I can’t get on with my life without an eighth grade diploma.
I just posted this upthread, but same. Mine is not handing in History projects or not going to History class all semester but part of me realizes I have an MA in History.
I love that this reminded me of how much I like being an adult. (But also is 13 Going on 30 in reverse. Isn’t it weird that Andy Serkis was in a romcom?)
I love Andy Serkis in that movie. Precursor to the British Evil Lady’s Magazine Boss of Tilda Swinton in Trainwreck?
*tears up grad school applications, clings to office*
It can’t get me!
This is half the reason I have sworn to never, ever go to grad school. The other half is that my college GPA sucked balls and I probably wouldn’t have been accepted. But it’s one of the few circumstances where I am being 100% sincere when I say “pfft, whatever, I didn’t want to go anyway.”
My dad told me on the day I graduated college that he had never seen me look so happy or relaxed in my entire life. Duh, I don’t have to go to class anymore!
I mean, there’s a lot more drinking in grad school at least.
Yup, this is also a common nightmare for me. It used to be nightmares about not being able to open my locker (or worse, my gym locker, those were super hard to open), then when I graduated college it became a science class I had signed up for and then thought I had dropped, but hadn’t done so properly, and now I have to take the final and I don’t know any science, and there is going to be an F on my report card AND I WILL HAVE TO EXPLAIN IT TO MY PARENTS AAAAAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE this is actually the worst part of the nightmare…
I had the back in school dream last night but this time it was cool because Chris Pratt was sitting next to me. He was writing jokes on my notes. Best back in school dream ever.
Heh, this can’t be real because at my school band practice was at 6 am and it was every day until the end of football season. What could be more fun than being awake when it is still dark out and frost is forming on the ground and a teacher is yelling at you while somebody with an out-of-tune trumpet plays in your ear? Not that I’m still LIVID that my parents made me sign up for it or anything.
SIX AM??? DURING THE SCHOOL YEAR??? I don’t think we even got up that early for band camp
I wasn’t even a band geek so it wasn’t like I was making sacrifices to do something I loved. My parents just thought it would be character-building. I played the cymbals, and sometimes the triangle.
At my band camp they woke us up in the morning by having one of the counsellors who played a horn (they all took turns) play Reveille directly outside our cabin windows. Being woken up by a baritone horn solo at 7:30 am was hellish, but your 6 am band still beats me by a long shot.
Oooh, I remember that from music camp. Not pleasurably.
Though on the last day, they woke us up with the revving engine intro to “Burn Rubber” by Greg Kihn, which was, inexplicably, THE song that year for all us classical musicians.
I told my parents I switched from band to choir in high school because marching band was too much for my already heavy extracurricular schedule (I already took dance 4-5 days a week).
But it was honestly a convenient excuse to get out of zero hour band practice outside in November.
OK, but do you remember how toned your arms were? Carrying an ice-cold brass instrument whilst marching for the first hour of every school day gets you swoll.
I’ve had this dream and after I wake I often wonder what would happen if my 34-year old mind did go back in time and reinhabit my 12-year old body and the main conclusion I’ve come to is that I would miserably fail all my classes except English (in which I would get a C- for talking about Lacan during our discussion of ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS), because while I am definitely wiser now, I am also extremely dumber.
And also, the ways in which I AM smarter/more knowledgeable would probably actually get me fails for being a smartarse. I went to a great school that encouraged independent thought but I mean it was also a Catholic school and so all those essays about heteropatriarchy probably wouldn’t go over so great…
My dreams on this subject are always about being the lead in a high school play and not being able to read my lines because you vision is blurry.
Mallory, you are pure evil. I’m going to go memorize Our Town now, just in case.
Does anyone ever smell freshly copied paper and immediately get that nausea-inducing deja vu feeling and get transported back to a time when your grade school classroom always smelled like that and erasers?
HA, Highs School? Amateurs. MY school-related-nightmares are finding myself back in Elementary school, at my current age (37) surrounded by appropriately aged children (10-12 ish), and having it slowly dawn upon me that I am quite a bit OLDER than these kids, and that maybe I should not BE here? And sort of looking at the teacher going: “Is this normal?”, and already thinking up excuses like: “But I wanted to get a really good grip on the basic stuff.” And then the shaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame starts, and then I wake up in a sweat.
#whatdoyoumeannowonder #notsymbolicofmylifeatall #shutup.
Yes, I basically have this dream too! Mine is high school, but I’m 34 and somehow I forgot to take a class or failed something back in high school and if I don’t make it up now, none of my later degrees will be valid. It’s incredibly embarrassing and I’m surrounded by all these teenagers that I don’t know how to interact with…ugh. Then it usually turns into a dream about a math exam I haven’t prepared for.
So when do these dreams stop? I’m in my early thirties, and I was telling a coworker yesterday about one of my back in high school, can’t remember my locker combination, forgot to go to a class all year dreams, and she said she still gets them all the time, too. She is almost 70 years old.
My dad just turned 70 and still has school-related anxiety dreams, so…probably never?
Yup, my dad is 71 and has the same exact school stress dreams that I do.
I keep having dreams where I find out that I never actually completed my MLIS and I’m going to lose my job because of it and none of my old profs will talk to me so I can figure out what to do. I only graduated 2 years ago though. I am holding on to the hope that they’ll fade.
I often wonder how something so historically recent can hook itself so deeply and universally into our subconscious. And what’s the equivalent dream in agricultural or hunter-gatherer societies?
It’s the night before your first big hunt, and your spear has broken in half.
You go to the tanner’s hut for a strip of animal hide/leather to tie the two pieces together, but when you get there your mother is sitting there playing the ocarina. The tribe elder is there and whips you with the strip of leather you were seeking. You stumble out of the hut, and fall off a cliff into a stampeding herd of Bison.
You have completely forgotten how to make a handaxe and everyone is laughing at you.
It’s halfway through harvest and you haven’t noticed and now all the crops will go to seed and your whole village will starve to death and it’s all your fault.
For me they shifted a little bit once I started teaching–my school anxiety dreams now involve being about 2/3 of the way through the semester and realizing that I have not bothered to write a syllabus, choose readings, or even go to the damn class at all. I look at the class roster and am like, “TF is this shit? Am I supposed to know who these people are?”
A professor of mine had similar dreams, except that he was at a lectern facing a class of 50 women all named Jennifer.
I think whether or not you believe in an afterlife is key to the answer to this question.
But, oh my god, the locker combo thing……….. So much of my dream life has been dedicated to freaking locker combos. Look, dream self, I kept that info written in pencil on the top left hand corner of the back of the first page of my planner. Every year. And I kept my planner with me all day for the first month of school no matter what. And you’ve watched all the youtube videos about how to figure out a locker combo by feeling/listening, and that totally worked with those lockers. My final schedule was also taped to the inside cover of the same planner. If I had forgotten my schedule, I could walk into room 212, which had the binder full of every single student’s schedule. Sure, whats-her-name, the secretary that taught the Ukrainian Egg class in middle school wouldn’t let just anyone look at it, but if she was there, she’d look up your schedule for you, and if she wasn’t, you could just grab the binder your damn self. You’ve got this covered, you’ve got a backup plan, YOU CAN STOP HAVING THIS FREAKING DREAM.
La la la my high school didn’t have enough lockers for even 1/3 of the students, so they just ripped them out and we had to lug all of our books around all day, but I don’t ever have these dreams! La!
I have these dreams more about my high school job, I’m there and I don’t have my uniform and I’ve somehow wandered off in the middle of my shift and need to get back before the people I was serving start to complain…
Do people who talk about how carefree childhood was and how high school was the best days of their lives have these dreams?
I have that dream about my job now. That fifteen minute break somehow stretches into three hours, and wait, I still have a shift to finish? Shit.
Oh my gosh stupid locker combinations! In my last version of that dream, I couldn’t even remember how a combination lock worked. I was like “what is this, I’m an adult now and only use Real Locks, oh god I’m going to be late for everything”
Sometime in my thirties they switched for a while to “found a kitten/baby in my apartment that I’ve forgotten to feed” so you could have that to look forward to…
I just started having these! But with small pets, like fish and mice, or plants. Will they eventually turn into kitten/baby dreams? I CAN’T HANDLE THAT.
Old enough to remember the Beatles when they were still together. Still get ’em.
I’m the teacher and I still have these dreams. It’s a bit surreal going from thinking you are going to be late to class and get detention, then not long after having to write a referral…
We had a teacher in high school who never bothered to remember what room his class was in. He’d just wander up and down the hall until he saw one of the students he recognised as being in that class, and then whatever room they were in, that was the room he taught that class in. Usually it was the correct room.
Luckily, he was rad as shit, so usually we delegated a person to linger outside of the door as a marker for him.
This speaks to me.
it was my first day of school today.
I’m going to drown in reading assignments. Thankfully it’s just graphic memoirs.
i’ve never had “you’re back in middle school” dreams BEFORE, but I think Mallory just taught me a whole new category of fear
MOM
DAMNIT MOM
KNOCK FIRST
I’ll be ready for school in time! Just… please close the door on your way out.
As a former homeschooler, this honestly gives me great perspective on appreciating adult life. Because Adulthood with it’s “show up at 8:30 a.m., stay chained to a desk all day, no matter what you get done, oh and you have to pay for everything & your car has trouble that you have to fix alone,” IS this nightmare for me. 😛
(I don’t count college because you get to skip classes if you feel like it, and ti’s not like you’re going to get FIRED. The real-world adult consequences of decisions were just not as apparent to me then.)
i sent this to my partner just so i am not the only one who has anxious dreams about high school tonight mwahah-
*sobs*
I have to come down here to compliment MacCrocodile because brilliant gyyyyaaahaaa, but also I’m afraid that it’ll be seen and then I’ll be inside of it.
I’ll be real, the I’m-back-in-school dream is infinitely preferable to the my-parents-figured-out-how-to-go-through-my-browsing-history dream.
This comment stream is fast approaching critical nitemare fuel.
I just gasped so hard I choked.
Mallory. This is the actual most horrifying thing you’ve ever written. I am certain that you were cackling wildly to yourself as you wrote it.
So I don’t really have back-to-school dreams ever, but I am still, at age 30, having the occasional dream about my high school crush (who rejected me when I gathered up the courage to ask him to the Winter Formal junior year). Most recently, I dreamed that we met again as adults and slept together, then afterward realized that in doing so we had both cheated on our partners. It was…not a great dream.
With relative consistency, I still have dreams about my first high school boyfriend, like, 13 years after high school. I used to have them when I was getting feelings for someone new, but that doesn’t happen anymore. And yet, he still pops up in my dreams sometimes.
I had a dream that my mother had hired my first crush to do some kind of handiwork. And it was all fun and nice because we were still getting along really well and flirting and I was just so sure we were going to fall in love, but then later in the dream it turned out he had a girlfriend and they were expecting a baby and I was DEVASTATED.
Ouch.
This just drives home the point of how hardcore I could not get through Middle/High School a second time. How did I even do it the first time? I’m having anxiety about going back and getting a graduate degree, and with that I’d still have my own apartment… K-12 school is psychologically taxing, man. The further I get from it, the more I can understand the kids I knew who dropped out.
I’m only just now realizing that my strategy of “work so hard and overachieve so much that even you don’t realize how exhausted and unhappy you are” established some *terrible * patterns with regard to my professional life.
I realized when I graduated college that the only way anyone could stand 12 years of compulsory schooling was because they had literally never known anything else. That’s why they have to start you when you’re five. You have to believe that this is the way life is and that it only gets harder.
“Best years of your life”? Fucking bullshit. Yeah, I have to go to work every day, but then I get to come home and eat cereal for dinner while playing a video game on my phone and watching tv at the same time.
Also when I’m at work no one is forcing me to write formulaic essays about the Great Gatsby or telling me to spit out my gum.
And you can take a piss whenever you damn well need to. Or even not. Just go to the bathroom and sit quietly in a stall for five minutes without anyone giving you side-eye.
And I can drink water whenever I want! My high school banned water bottles for awhile to stop us from sneaking in vodka or something. Of course, the dean also described scheduling prom the weekend before AP Exams as successful “brinkmanship,” so basically even the worst day of my job is 1000x better than a pretty okay day at high school.
Not if you work retail or food service or a lot of blue-collar jobs.
I’d really like to go back in time and tell my English teacher that Gatsby is “overrated erotic friend fiction”, as one Toastie put it.
(Except he probably wouldn’t have known what that was, back in 1996…)
Also if i have friends or family members who are mean to me, I can just stop talking to them.
I can wear a hat if I choose to. And headphones, most of the time! And spaghetti-strap tank tops!
I do not need permission to use the bathroom! [throws confetti]
I’m AT WORK and I’m not wearing pants OR a bra because I work from home, where none but my cat can judge me.
Adult life is pretty good.
And to be fair, there’s no way you could live so as NOT to incur the judgment of a cat.
Bookmarking this to send to the next person I see saying “ahh, childhood, those carefree days” or similar. I want to see how bad they twitch reading this.
Oh god, am I American now? Media has taught me that American middle school is even worse than the UK equivalent (that is, the first few years of secondary school, unless you’re from one of those weird pockets that actually has middle schools). At least we started in September and didn’t have to be in until half eight at the earliest. (It was still hellish. I refuse to go back.)
Thanks, I don’t have this nightmare nearly enough! :p
“Wake up Sarah, you’ve got Calculus, then AP Latin, then AP English, then AP Physics, then…what? You haven’t been going to your classes all term? Just what have you been doing?! Oh, you’re in big, big trouble. You’ll never get into MIT or Caltech now.”
I have the nightmare that I am still at MIT and I missed registration day and I have no idea what room any of my classes are in and I can’t even remember what classes I am taking but I definitely need them all to graduate.
Screw you, Ortberg!
Not enough money in the world to make me go back there, even in my dreams.
I actually find this premise very exciting and am imagining all the things I would prioritize differently if I could go back to high school with my young adult experience. (I’d learn how to code and take a gap year abroad before college). I also love school, though, so.
I used to have panic attacks about being late pretty often. Then one day my junior year in college I showed up for my final and there was… no one there. No one outside studying, no doors to the lecture hall open, no notices posted, just… no one. In a panic I ran to the building where the TAs and professors had offices, and I was sweating and hyperventilating when I finally ran into my TA in the hall. “Oh honey,” she said, “that final was yesterday. We wondered where you were, you were doing so well in the class and it didn’t seem like you to just not show up.”
I started to cry and she patted my shoulder. “We had to send someone else home, they were too exhausted to keep their eyes open and clearly not in any shape to take the exam. We’ve scheduled a make-up exam that starts in an hour, come back then and you can take it with her.” Then she did maybe the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. She said, “You know how you have those nightmares about missing something important?” I nodded while taking deep breaths. “Well now you’ve done it, and it’s not so bad! You never have to have those nightmares again.”
And I haven’t.
*sobbing*
Man, the instructor for the university course where I slept through a midterm was way less understanding/accomodating than that.
Happily the people I had to deal with to get a late withdrawal without academic penalty were much better, so it still wasn’t the end of the world that I’d missed something important, but still.
She was pretty amazing, I was enormously grateful to her for her kindness.
I’m so happy she was so kind to you!
My friend freshman year literally skateboarded into her math final two hours late. But she got an A anyway.
Not only to me, but also to have paid close enough attention to see that there was someone who DID show up but shouldn’t have (the person the make-up test was scheduled for). That class had about 200 people in it, so picking someone out and being kind enough to send them home to sleep and arrange for them to take it later is pretty impressive.
The TAs name was Marisela, I’m forgetting her last name but I will always remember what she did.
That woman is a SAINT and I hope everyone in her life appreciated her.
It’s the first day of school all right. Except I’m the underpaid and overworked grad student TA and it is ALL AWFUL.
Oh god yes. The only thing worse than taking an 8 AM college class is teaching one.
Ya know, I get the point of this, but as I was homeschooled — AND had a great middle school, sorry — this is a mere echo of the horror I am sure many of you feel.
AAAH AAAAAH AAAAAAAAAAAA
NICE TRY, but my alarm went off at 4:45 am and I was on the bus at 5:30, and also if my mom had been left to get me out of bed she would have been screaming all of that, not saying it calmly and calling me honey. HAHA MY REALITY WAS MORE OF A NIGHTMARE THAN YOUR FAKE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO, AHA, AHAHAHA, HAHA…
…
:(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
(same. Plus side… WE’RE OUT!)
Who has two thumbs but has never had this dream? This girl (and every other former lifelong homeschooler).
Oh my god, if I could go back but bring the mind I have now, I would be RUNNING THAT PLACE inside of four days.
Don’t forget that you just got your period six months ago and will spend the next four-plus years bursting into tears at the slightest provocation. Oh and that gross kid in science class will tease you about the hair on your upper lip.
“Also, remember that Diane and Briana are both mad at you, so their moms won’t be picking you up for their carpool anymore, and you’ll have to navigate that emotionally today as well.”
Too real. The anxiety about where to sit at lunch when I was on the outs with my friends would render me useless all morning.
I have two little sisters who are in high school and this just makes me so, so sad for them. I regularly tell them that life will get much better in the future, but… STILL.
Somehow I completely forgot about my regularly recurring nightmare: I’m back in high school and I’ve skipped so much school that I can’t remember my schedule or my way around the school and I sit in class terrified that the teacher will call on me and I’ll have no idea while simultaneously being terrified that I’ll never be able to pass. I had that dream regularly starting in grad school and it’s tapered off but I still have nightmares about high school more than anyone in their mid-thirties should.
And just typing that out made me anxious and nauseous….
I always knew Peggy Sue Got Married was a horror film.
Oh dear, too close to home! I have a reoccurring stress dream that pops up when my professional life is in transition: I have to go back to the eleventh grade, but as the 31 year old, graduate school scholarship winning, world-traveling, career-having person I am now, because someone discovered I never actually graduated from high school (which I did in real life, but by the skin of my teeth because I was bored and hated it). My life becomes a nightmare of arguing with the ignorant and burnt out teachers, until the end of time.
Also SURPRISE you have locker inspections and you are about to have your third period ever.
My not-super-fond-of-math kid struggled so much with 7:50 am Algebra last year. He’s got math 6th period now, and English 1st, and I couldn’t be happier. He can absolutely sleepwalk through English and do well.
(this was replying to the thread about kids and early waking hours)
It’s funny– I don’t feel like I’m supposed to be going back to school anymore this time of year (finally, at age 35), but I do feel a very strong urge to buy pens.
(I do have constant dreams that I can’t graduate high school because I failed gym class, but I usually remember at some point while I’m dreaming that I have a law degree now, so I must have finished high school).
I just bought some fancy pens because it is that time of year.
wait. is…is that why i just restocked my office desk with new packs of .5mm black gel pens (and felt so much satisfaction in doing so?)
You can’t get me this way, because HOMESCHOOLED.
So instead all my anxiety dreams are about summer camp and Awful Theatre Lit. Midterms.
Once I even dreamed that the professor brought muffins instead of the test. And almost didn’t leave my bed because I believed in the reality of the muffin midterm.
The muffin midterm was a lie.
I don’t have this specific nightmare, but my son is taking his first AP class this year, and he keeps asking me for help. I’m trying to coach him along to AP-level reading and writing habits as quickly as I can, but I don’t really recall signing on for this nonsense.
It was so weird, Mom. I dreamed that you were a humorist at some kind of feminist computer magazine.
Can I have toast for breakfast?
….I love you, Mom. Maybe I don’t say that often enough, but it’s true.
I really miss those early-morning car rides with my dad and although I would not like to wake up and be 12, I would actually give quite a lot to have just one more. Even if it was 6am and dark.
The college I am teaching at this semester starts next Tuesday. Every night this week, I have woken up in a cold sweat believing firmly that I missed the first day of classes
Noooooooooo
This is my life right now -_-; Stuck with a bunch of 17-year-olds in college and said college has decided that I need 9 classes because it hasn’t recognized the 5 years of university I’ve already done. FML
Longer? Wow. I think we got maybe 25-30 minutes for lunch. It took some creative driving on senior lunch days to get away and back in time. Fortunately, I was a teacher's aide that period and she looked the other way whenever I came back late….
Ok so the thing I want to know is, when I get to be 32 again, do I get to keep going and be 33, or do I wake up as a middle schooler AGAIN.
Just last week I had dinner with some friends and their 12 year old daughter. When I asked her what was new with her she told me that she is miserable and everyone at school hates her :(. Her mum tried to make light of it but I was envisaging the next 5 years for her and feeling terrible. Thankfully she did brighten up when she started talking about a game she plays online and the community she has there. Thank goodness for the internet (something that was not available to me when I was 12 and all my friends at school turned against me!).
My school rotated the order of the periods so that no course would have only sleepy people all the time. Which probably worked, I guess, but it does mean that first period spares weren't a possibility.
Plus you had to fill out the form for what you wanted to take before they actually scheduled anything.
mallory nooooooooo
p.s: i’ve only been an adult for about two years and even though it’s sucked (mostly) i still prefer it to going to school. adulthood has much more sex and money and booze! i’m bitter i missed so many good years because of dealing with school and a chronic illness.
Guess who was homeschooled and feels absolutely nothing while reading this? Now to get my denim jumper on and start my day…