Because of the medicine I take at night, I can always count on being in a very deep sleep all night. As a result, I am able to have, or remember, very vivid, lengthy dreams every night. The dreams I have usually always leave me scratching my head. I have a couple of dream interpretation dictionaries on the shelf because there are some strange things that pop up in my dreams. I still haven't found the meaning behind coming across an orca whale stranded in the parking lot of a hospital that I am rushing into. There are some recurring dreams that I have that I don't have to guess the meaning behind. I quit smoking about 6 years ago and every now and then I'll have a dream where I am smoking. Though in the dream, I have already quit and I know I shouldn't be smoking. There's a feeling of guilt that accompanies the act in the dream. I always wake up feeling very relieved that it was just a dream and my decision to quit is reaffirmed. I find that those dreams usually come at a time when I'm tempted to start up again. There is one recurring dream, however, that I find relevant to Christmas. Every now and then I will dream about waking up on Christmas Eve, only to find that I have missed the entire Christmas season. I've missed all the Christmas music, the television specials, and the general air of anticipation. Now here it is, 4 full days before Christmas and I haven't missed anything 'Christamsy', but how can it possibly be that it is only 4 days until Christmas?! That's the part that baffles me. This entire year has gone by SO fast! It seems like I have been flipping pages on the calendar every other day. This isn't the first time that I have noticed time going by fast. Every Christmas, for me, brings about a sense of "Where has this year gone?". I look at Christmas as an adult as the direct opposite of Christmas as a child. When I was a kid, as I'm sure it is for every kid, Christmas took forever to arrive. Now, the days left can be counted on one hand. I don't think time is going to slow down any time soon though. The next step in my life will be to have children of my own and I'm sure that all parents will agree, time passes by so quickly when you are watching your children grow. So for now, I'm going to do my best to cherish the remaining time that I have before the Christmas music stops being played constantly on the radio and a new year is upon me.
Elapsed time is a math concept that I expected would fly over the top of my third graders' heads. After a particularly long lesson yesterday in a desperate attempt for the students to learn the skill, I figured that today's review activity would be tedious. The activity was a simple worksheet, but they got to do each problem with a partner. I had a copy of the worksheet on the overhead projector. I assigned a problem from the paper, gave them time to solve it with their partner, then we went over the answer on the overhead. Perhaps it was the enthusiasm in my voice when I called on students, or perhaps they secretly like math, in any case, they started to cheer when they got the right answer! They all begged to be the person to give an answer to the next problem! Even better, they were giving the right answers! Whew! Another job well done in my quest to get my third graders to master telling time.
