Hard Reset

I had a strange occurrence a couple of mornings ago. I haven't been sleeping very well, and -- par for the course -- I haven't been getting nearly enough sleep. I'm sacrificing sleep for this blog post as we speak, in fact. Anyway, my alarm went off at 5:40, as it does every morning. Only, when I heard it, I was struck by a strange notion; I believed that the only way to get the alarm to truly turn off was to remove its power. As I didn't want to wake anyone in the house (a particular concern of mine), it seemed totally logical to me that I needed to do more than just turn off the alarm. I needed to unplug the clock.

So that's what I did.

Then, I laid back down, fully intending to get up when my body had properly acclimated to wakefulness, as I so often do. And usually, I can do so in about 5 minutes. But not this time. This time I fell back to sleep pretty hard, and almost certainly would have overslept, but for one saving factor; my alarm clock has a battery backup. At 5:49, it dutifully (though slightly more quietly) went off again.

This time, I was able to rouse myself into my senses well enough to not only actually rise from bed, but also plug the clock back in and head off to the shower, with gratitude for modern technology.
What does it all mean? Not much, other than that I need to get to bed at a more decent hour, and procrastinate a little less so my frazzled brain isn't trying so desperately to find solutions to phantom problems. But I found a parallel in this freaky event; my stress-swollen brain convinced my sleep-schizoid body that I needed to perform a "hard reset" on my clock in order to continue its proper operation. Both my brain and my body -- IMHO -- need the same "hard reset" to get back to proper operation themselves. I'm a better teacher now than I was a year ago, and I firmly believe that my improvement as a teacher is on an exponential track (if I'm 75% better than I was last year, then a year from now I'll be 150% better). But before I can make that quantum jump, I need a hard reset.

And I'll get it, in 10 school days from now.

Obama may want to change us all over to year-long schooling, and it just might be better for the kids. But I sure hope he doesn't succeed in making it happen until I'm done improving as a teacher.