I HAVE DREAMS A Brentwood Schoolteacher Shares Her Fantasies and Loves
	January/February 2005

by Jackie Irwin

I’m not a dreamer in the sense that you usually think of when you hear the word. I literally dream! I have such incredibly humorous dreams at night that I actually look forward to going to bed. Sometimes I wake up laughing in the middle of the night, which annoys my husband. “What are you laughing about?” he would petulantly ask. The dream would be too weird to explain, but by morning he would often have forgotten the experience.

When the Clinton thing was going on with Monica Lewinski, for example, I had a series of dreams about the two of them. Sometimes I would be a new reporter and would be questioning Clinton about the event. I would become embarrassed about my questions and then get upset at myself for being embarrassed. At that point I would burst right out laughing in my sleep and wake my husband and myself up.

I met my husband in Oregon while I was attending OSU. I grew up in LA and my friends kidded me about my decision to go to school in Oregon. They would ask me such questions as, “Will you be going to tractor races?” I ended up actually doing a redneck sort of thing. In order to help pay for my school bills I got a job pumping gas at a rural service station.

I got the job because I thought it would be a way to meet local people. As a matter of fact, I was right. One of the local people I met was destined to become my husband.

I actually almost didn’t meet him because my boss pointed to a guy hanging around outside the station and told me, “That guy is going to come in and ask you to go out with him. Don’t do it. He’s a bum!”

The guy reinforced my boss’s “bum” label by laying rubber on the way into the service station. We were busy at that time and I was pumping gas for people, cleaning their windshields, checking their oil. The whole time the guy was just standing there watching me.

I knew why he was there and what he wanted, so I wrote my name and phone number on a paper, gave it to him, and said, “Here! Call me later.” I wasn’t going to listen to my boss or to anyone else. I didn’t take people’s advice. A wiser, more subservient person than I used to be would have heeded my boss’s grim warning. However, the way you could get me to do something in those days was by telling me not to do it.

Even though he hadn’t yet perfected his driving habits, the boy was cute and sweet. We were off and on for a few years while we both took some time to grow up and figure out what we really wanted. We finally decided that what we really wanted was each other. I guess it was true love, because we got married 16 years ago and it’s been a good ride for both of us.

Teacher and Writer
I began teaching in elementary school and had a difficult transition into first grade. I went into the classroom believing that I didn’t have to be a strict disciplinarian and, as a result, the students took control of the classroom.

I had the public school equivalent of a cellblock riot going on by the end of the day, and ended up wringing my hands and asking myself. “What have I done?” I discovered the hard way that first graders aren’t into nuanced behavior and subtle control mechanisms. They need a Drill Sergeant. At least they need to be told what to do, and the sequence to do it in, with no argument permitted.

I really don’t do the Drill Sergeant thing. We have little cards that contain the classroom rules. The children have all bought into the rules because they helped me make the list. The rules contain basic principles such as, “Be nice to your neighbor,” and “No dangerous things.”

When I was little I wrote all the time. My teachers gave me a lot of encouragement and sometimes would read my little stories and essays out loud to the rest of the class. It was great fun!

Some of my early stories were about my awful brothers who, since they were larger than me, would beat me up. But the word is mightier than the sword, as they say, so I would get back at them with my accounts of how foolish they were.

I learned a lot about writing for children by observing a class of second graders. The best thing about the time I spent with them was the sound of their laughter. I read books to them that would make them laugh so hard they would all rock back and forth.

It occurred to me that I could write books that would make children laugh like that. I just needed to learn how. I watched to see what kinds of things made them laugh. I discovered that a second grader’s sense of humor is fairly broad. The less sophisticated something was, the more delighted their laughter became.

The source of greatest humor was bodily sounds. A belch or choking cough would send them into gales of laughter. Of course, the greatest laughter of all was reserved for anything that even remotely sounded like someone passing gas. I concluded that children’s books should have some earthy humor in them.

Characters Real and Fictional
I got the idea for my first children’s book from a real person. One of my peers was possibly the meanest teacher on earth, so I went to her classroom just to observe her in action.

That woman wasn’t merely a Drill Sergeant; for seven hours a day she was commandant of a small concentration camp; the classroom was her personal stalag. She ruled with an iron hand over her terrified young prisoners. I don’t know how the woman ever managed to accomplish anything in a classroom full of children who were riveted with fear.

The woman was not just mean to her students, she was mean to parents, teachers, to everybody. The kids were all petrified of the horrible person. I took her mean nature and activities and blew them up into mythic proportions and she became the central villain in The Secrets of Seacrest School.

I drew from some other personal experiences for the people in the story. My daughter was running for treasurer in fourth grade, for example, so Seacrest School has an election. Children in the story are modeled after students I knew myself.

The actual story was easy to write, but the book took a long time coming together. I ended up finishing the project because of a random event in my own life. A parent of one of my students was such a thoroughly dysfunctional individual that he made me consider seeking another field. I wanted to get the book published so I could get out of the teaching profession, if I needed to.

I began the final writing at 5 a.m. one morning with a hot cup of coffee by my hand and over the next four hours finished it. I put the manuscript into a drawer and left it there for some months. Then one day I got a phone call from that same insane parent, even though his child was no longer in my class. I took out the manuscript and began the final rewrite.

A company called Publish America published my book under the theme of overcoming hardship. The story actually reminds me of one of my dreams. Some passages have a fanciful, dreamlike quality. For example, the two villains meet an improbable fate at the end. I’m not going to tell you what it is (and give it away), but it’s the kind of thing that could make we wake up laughing in the middle of the night if I dreamt it.

Trying to Say “Goodbye”
I’m always working on something. Now I’m trying to lay a ghost to rest by writing an account of my brother. Through a series of bad choices, my brother is now deceased, but I guess I’m still trying to get back at him. My brother’s bad example taught me the important principle that if you can’t make good decisions when you are little, you probably won’t make good decisions when you are grown.

I tell my students, “If you can’t make the correct decision now between chips and an apple, then when you are grown you’ll have a hard time making a decision between getting into a car with a drunk driver and taking a cab home.”

My brother provided an effective example of how not to live, but his life was much more than that. When we were little he would take such good care of me. He was three years older than me and would often walk with me to school. My brother imagined that his job was taking care of his sister. “Hold my hand,” he would say.

I remember once walking home from kindergarten. On my lapel I had a fancy button labeled ”Best Rester“ that I had gotten that day during our nap period. Some mean kids made fun of me. One of the older children assaulted me, knocked me down, ripped off my pin, and then jumped on me as I lay on the ground.

Suddenly my brother was there punching the bully in the face. I remember the kid ran away and came back blubbering with some adults. I told them what had happened. When they found my “Best Rester” button in the young thug’s pocket, they hauled him away for further discipline.

I wish my brother were still alive. I’ve never had a happy dream with him in it. That guy gave the best hugs of anyone I ever knew. He is hugging me in my dreams sometimes and I awaken with tears on my cheeks.

The worst thing about having a loved one leave suddenly is trying to get closure. It was horrible when my grandma died, but we were ready for death by the time death came for her. We weren’t ready with my brother.

Writing my story has been a healing exercise for my heart. He died four years ago and I miss him horribly. I wish I could hear him say again, “Hold my hand,” and could reach out my hand now and have him take it. What a wonderful dream that would be!