It has become a tradition in the school where I work to let sleeping students sleep, so long as those students don’t belong in the class where they are sleeping.

If they do belong to the class, they are woken up right away and sent to their seats.

If they don’t, as long as they are not in another student’s seat, we have fun trying to figure out how long they will sleep before waking up and realizing they are in the wrong room.

In my case the record is 15 minutes. Fellow students attempted to wake the student and, after he didn’t wake up, I checked to make sure he was breathing. Once I confirmed he was breathing, i started class. After 15 minutes he suddenly woke up and looked around. He seemed confused as to why there was a foreigner at the front of the class. Once he realized what my job was, he then looked around and realized he was in the wrong class. He then made production of getting ready slowly as if to prove he were still cool, rather than groggy looking with drool stains on his face.

As I’ve mentioned before, something like this happened to me last week. Two students arrived late, one after the other, as they woke up and realized they were not where they were supposed to be. At least one remained in a semi-awake state the remainder of the class as he’d clearly been woken up before reaching a proper level of REM sleep.

The other had apparently gotten a proper amount of sleep as he had a lot of energy. Unfortunately it was not positive energy. Just noisy energy.

I confirmed with my colleague that they had been asleep in his class and not running around the school. Mind you, it didn’t matter what they were doing. All that mattered was they were late.