I Had a Dream

         My name is Susan Manees and I have taught English at Little Rock Hall High School for twenty years.  Recently I had a dream that I would like to share with you…….

         The bell had just rung when I breezed into the school office and bumped into my principal of the last ten years, Dwight Hutto. He was flanked by about eight of my sophomore English student's parents.  I remember thinking, Oh, oh.  What have I done now?

         “Mrs. Manees, I’m glad you’re here,” Principal Hutto said.  “These parents would like to meet with us a few minutes, if you don’t mind.  Thinking  Yes, I mind, I very much mind, I smiled and followed him into the office.

          This was beginning to take on nightmare proportions.  Usually, when I have nightmares, I can tell myself to wake up, that it is only a dream.  But, it’s not working now!

         I sat down and began to look around.  What in the world could this be about?

         “We realize you’re very busy, so we’ll get right to the point,”  Mrs. Eoff began.  “Some of us parents were thinking the other day,”  Time to get worried!   “and we wondered why there were no academic booster clubs at our school.”  Say what?  I thought,  looking at them rather stupidly.  These people had been watching too much Star Trek.

         “Of course there’s not,” Mrs. Richardson interjected. “English is not a contact sport where one student tries to physically annihilate another…”

         “ Now, Marian, let’s keep to the point,” her husband interrupted. “The point being that we want to help.”

         “Huh?” was the only comment I could come up with in spite of the vocabulary study that I ruthlessly drive my students through week after week.

         “Yes,” gushed the always gushing Mrs. Isom. “We thought--there’s that word again--that we could form an English Parents Booster Club. We want to help make sure our students have the necessary equipment and help to make them into All Star English students.

         I was trying to keep from falling out of my chair when I uttered a desperate, “Excuse me?”

         “Here are a few of the ideas we jotted down. Look over this,” Mr. Richardson said as he handed me a typewritten piece of paper. “Be sure and tell us any ideas you might have.”

          I better pinch myself to see if I am dreaming. No! No! I can’t do that. I AM  dreaming and I sure as heck don’t want to wake up! I have to fight what little consciousness I have acquired and force myself back into REM —deep REM, I hope.

         As I start to look over the piece of paper I have been handed, Mrs. Bemiller catches my attention as she excitedly said, “The first thing we want to do is to sponsor an English Homecoming.” Oh God. This is nightmare! “We’ll have a whole week of school-wide activities including, but not limited to, daily funny dress up days, a parade, a big assembly for the presentation of the royalty who will be dressed in formals and tuxes… I knew this was too good to be true...It’s becoming a nightmare for sure now. I allowed Mrs. Bemiller’s grating voice to be blanked from my mind as I began to read what the English Booster Club hoped to accomplish besides disrupting school for a whole week and electing another The Same Old Royal Court that we’d had for football and basketball homecoming.
         
         My cynicism began to fade as I read that the English Booster Club sought to organize at least 60% of my students’ parents. They would meet twice monthly, and have regular fund raisings to help supply the English classroom with class size sets of novels, state-of-the-art computers and printers, dictionaries, and thesauruses. A primary objective would be to stock the library with research materials, make online informational services available, buy lots of videos, books on tape, and the best young adult fiction available.

         In addition, the club would take on the responsibility of publishing a  high-end literary magazine of student writing. The English Booster Club would, of course, make these available without cost to the students, English letter jackets and patches were next. They also proposed to have money available for each English teacher to buy classroom materials with each year. Each member of the  parent organization would be required to spend one hour a week at school helping in the classrooms with tutoring, grading and secretarial tasks.

         R-R-RING! R-R-RING!  My alarm has destroyed my dream. I fumble to turn the jarring, nerve-racking much-hated clock off.  Wow! What a dream. If only parents were as fanatic about English as they are about sports.  Do you suppose that can really only happen in dreams?  I wonder.

(793 Words)