In singapore electricity is not free and as far as i know it's not from the sky

Well a new term at LTU has begun. As per usual I had a sleepless night pre-first day. I'm used to this, but it's annoying because I "went to bed early". Which really means I crawled into bed and watched a couple of episodes of Scrubs. Finally went to bed and then found myself plagued by the same old pre-term fears. What if my students don't like me? What if they're just uncool?? What if this is the class that finally exposes me for the fraud of a teacher that I am??? The last one seems to particularly haunt me. By most standards of self-doubt this is excessive. I know the course I teach backwards. The leading teacher now runs things by me rather than vice versa. I create materials that are used by all the other teachers on the course and blah blah. And yet, I still find myself sleepless the night before every term. Really, it makes me kind of sick to think that I'm the only one who doesn't think I'm good enough for the job. Or not to be good enough for the job, so much as being good enough to have earnt the esteem I'm held in by colleagues. I'm torn between being shocked that they can't see through me and being surprised that I don't have more faith in what I do. Ultimately I know I rock the job, I just always get queasy the night before the new term. None of this was helped by the fact that my class from last term was probably my favourite that I have ever taught and I already knew they weren't in my class this term (I switched from afternoon class to morning and because of classroom availability probs they weren't allowed to come down with me).

I started off poorly this morning in class when I asked the French girl if she was German. I guess it would be like asking a Canadian if they were American. Needless to say, she was unimpressed. There was no ill intent on my part, just a brain-fart where I assumed she was German because I'd seen that there was a German on my class list. As it turns out that was someone else's class list that I had happened to be staring at mindlessly in my fugue state this morning before class. Sigh... typical Chris.

On the plus side, I had a dream that I was in an episode of Buffy last night. I was hanging out with the Scooby's and we planned the final assault on the Big Bad only to have it go completely balls-up on us. Very, very vivid dream, right down to the crisp morning grass crunching beneath my feet in the graveyard. Don't ask for more details than that because I don't remember. Obviously I'm about to hit a strange dream phase again, so I'll make more effort to remember them.