Concordia School Dream

Last night I had another dream, and it’s one in which I woke up and I knew there was a lot more action than I could actually remember. It took place at The Concordia School, Concord California. This was my elementary school from Pre-K through 5th grade, also where my mom was a teacher. It is a Montessori school where the philosophy is teach children how to learn. Methods such as hands-on learning, peers teaching peers, multi-age classrooms, and simply letting the kids run rampant (well, not exactly, but this certainly was close to the case for my friend Stephanie and I) dominated over lectures, note taking, and excessive amounts of homework.

Last night after dinner, after I wrote about my experience getting charla feedback, I went over to a friend’s house to work on yet another charla that we’ll be giving together next week. We chatted a little about our feedback and were in agreement that our evaluation was not exactly correct and a little less useful than we had hoped. I recalled a few of my experiences growing up in the Montessori school to describe that my philosophy of teaching is exactly what is desired here in the Peace Corps, only, it is not possible to be a good improviser and interactive teacher while still learning the basics of the language. I believe that because Concordia was on my mind so close to bedtime last night it slipped its way into my dream.

In the dream, the layout of Concordia was still the same of three houses clustered together in a residential part of town. The Junior Elementary on the left (grades 1-3), pre-K and Kindergarten in the middle, and Advanced Elementary on the right (4-6); turnaround with a big tree in the middle in front of the Kindergarten building, and grassy areas in front of the other two. The differences were in the style of the buildings and roads. The buildings were made of stone and were pretty beat up, not unlike the ancient stone buildings found in Antigua Guatemala. The streets were also cobblestone, and in the back yards of the schools were lines and lines of clothes hanging up to dry. On top of one of the tables outside was an old basketball camp shirt of mine, turned inside out, with a red flaming basketball on the front reading “LADY BULLDOG SUMMER BASKETBALL CAMP 1999“. This is the actual design of a old basketball camp shirt that I have which is currently sitting in a cardboard box in my dad’s house.

The action and dialogue of the dream that I can remember is pretty plain, it consisted of me, my friend from Concordia Stephanie, and another of our friends from Concordia named Ben Waters, driving around in a Peace Corps microbus and then arriving at Concordia School. There was an iPod involved somewhere, and I can remember an unusual amount of physical contact: we seemed to like to touch each other on the shoulder, or knee, or whatever while we were talking with each other. I remember telling them how my host family is dead set on marrying me off to somebody, anybody, as soon as possible, but I don’t really remember anymore.

Tonight I’ll take another dose of malaria meds so…maybe tomorrow I’ll have some more interesting stories to report!