Dealing with the Technology Generation

I've gotten pretty used to explaining "older" technology to my second graders, with each year getting worse.

I've explained those square things that we used to put into our computers...

I've explained what that curly thing coming off that old phone did...

But I was not ready for this one. My students were completing a Christmas crossword puzzle and I thought I had gone over all the "tricky" clues.

The clue for 15 Across (six letters) reads: "You might mail Santa one of these."

More than half of my students wrote:

e-mail

Nightmare

You can ask most teachers and they can tell you about "back-to-school" nightmares. Mine usually involve scary parents, destroyed classrooms, or huge 15-year-old students in my second grade class.

But all my dreams had one thing in common: I didn't actually know any of the people in them. When I have my class dreams, the kids have always just been random dream-children. Well...not anymore. I had the craziest dream about my class that I am teaching right now and it was unbelievably vivid. If you haven't heard, I only have 17 students in my class this year and they ROCK! They are smart, well-behaved kids and I love them.

Not so in my dream!

They were EVIL!!! They just seemed to hate me and were trying to make me made. I was yelling and screaming at them and they just ignored me. The part that I can not get out of my head is that I was yelling at one of my little girls, right in her face. She turned to face me and bit my cheek, hard enough to rip the skin!

This is when I woke up with my heart pounding. And I know perfectly well that it was just a dream, but when that little girl walked into class to day, my heart skipped a beat. :)