I’m sure you’re familiar with the typical school-related anxiety dream: you find out the morning of final exams that you forgot to drop your math class. You haven’t been attending all semester, but today you still HAVE TO TAKE THE FINAL!!!1! To make it worse, you oversleep for your final exam; you can’t find the classroom; you don’t have a working pencil. You know the drill.

I think I have discovered the teacher’s equivalent to this type of dream. It’s the Monday after finals week, students are all eagerly awaiting their final semester grades to be reported online, and you realize only too late that you have FORGOTTEN TO POST SEMESTER GRADES IN THE SYSTEM!!!1!! You scurry all around trying to get online and post the grades, but your wifi won’t connect; you can’t log in; you seem to have lost all the graded exams.

I’m not sure why I’m having anxiety dreams lately, as there is absolutely nothing stressful or even interesting going on in my life at the moment. I’m just another government-paid teacher sitting on my duff for my three-month summer vacation, raking in all these dollar bills from the taxpayer.

Reader, now is the moment when you hear the tell-tale record scratch.

Actually, I’m gearing up for my first of two summer gigs, which begins tomorrow. I’ll be spending a little over a week in another city grading standardized tests in my subject area. (I’m being explicitly vague about this because I don’t want to name the exact testing company here.) I’ll be working from 8-5 for seven days straight and spending my nights in a double-occupancy hotel room with a woman I’ve never met before. So this should be fun.  I welcome this opportunity to connect with other professionals in my field, talk about our subject, and peer deeply into the minds and hearts of thousands of America’s high-school students via their timed essays.

Is that laughter you’re hearing now, or weeping? Only time will tell.