Last night I dreamed I was giving students tests. Somehow, this shouldn't be surprising. But they were math tests.
It was mostly to my elementary students from Karma, including, especially, the highly talkative and distracting sixth graders from the ET2 cohort – these kids, among all my students, are the ones who have best figured out how to get me "off track" by asking random questions of intellectual curiosity, and who exercise this ability quite regulary to ensure we do the minimum amount of textbook work possible in a given class.
The same thing was going on during these math tests. The students kept trying to change the subject. The location was odd – it wasn't Karma, it was more like a midwestern American school, maybe. I don't even have much familiarity with midwestern American schools, so I'm not sure why I say that. Actually, if I recognized the building, it was the place where I started fourth grade in Oklahoma City, during that traumatic year that started with the 4 months in Oklahoma City and ended with my parents' divorce.
I have no idea what the symbolism is, of giving math tests to my Korean English students in a setting from my own childhood.
During the dream, when I collected the tests, I sat around scoring the tests with coworkers. The coworkers included fellow teachers from Karma, from Hongnong, and even from LBridge. And then the strangest part of the dream: one of the students, I think it was a girl named Hyewon from the ET2 class, got up and gave a presentation on why she got a bad score on the math test. As an English language speech, it was quite well-done and coherent and even interesting. As an excuse for doing badly on a math test, it was unlikely. She quoted the French philosopher Deleuze.
That's surreal, of course – Korean sixth graders don't quote Deleuze.
I looked down at the copy of her test that I'd scored. It was covered in red marks that I couldn't remember making. I couldn't understand the math, either. There were some computers next to me, like the ones in the staff room at Hongnong. I looked up and the vice principal was glaring incomprehendingly at the student's speech.
I woke up. I'd slept the longest I've slept uninterruptedly in a very long time – just over 8 hours. I've been struggling with my "wake up too early and can't get back to sleep" insomnia, lately, so I felt very good about this.
I thought about my dream, and had some rice and coffee (not mixed together) for breakfast.