These Halls Usued to be Taller! (excerpt)

[Here's a little snippet of the chapter I'm writing today. Hope you're all having a good week so far! -- Erin]

I am naked in bed, clutching blankets to my bosom and begging invisible first graders to "just do your work." Oh lord, here we go again.

Believing my apartment to be the classroom where I teach, I have developed the unsettling but unshakable habit of shooting bolt upright in bed at 3 a.m. I am not awake. This is a nightmare -- one where I am, quite simply, always at school. My closet is the chalkboard. The bureau is a bookshelf. And every lamp, end table, and pile of shoes is a student. Every shadow is a student. There are supposed to be 24 of them. Over and over again, I methodically count these invisible children aloud, praying each time that no six-year-old has been flushed down the toilet or lured from the monkey bars by a candy-wielding stranger. I have to count fast, for there is only one of me, and she is naked and stuck under blankets.

How unfair. These precious few hours before sunrise are my only chance to rest and regroup before another day in the trenches of teaching, and I am spending them -- as I'll spend every night of my first semester -- believing the kids are still in the room with me, that I am neglecting them by closing my eyes for a few seconds, that they will never learn to read or add or focus a microscope. Because of me, they will never graduate from high school, never go to college, never escape the housing projects where they live -- in the same neighborhood where I grew up and returned to teach. (To Make A Difference!) Instead I am ruining the Youth of America in my sleep, and worse, they have all just seen my boobs.

After several rounds of counting, I let go of the blanket with one hand and reach out to the two dozen three-foot phantoms. "Pleeeease! Just do your work for a few minutes! Mrs. Walter needs to sleep."