A teaching dream

The clock was running down and I was paging through a well-annotated paperback, trying to find a necessary passage from Walter Pater. (Walter Pater!) But the clock was running down, and the students were getting ready to go. “Make sure to be here on Thursday!” I yelled. “I’ll be assigning a novel you need to read for Monday.” Yes, the entire novel. Some turnaround! The time ran out, the students left the room, and I was still turning pages.

My dad (a tile contractor) told me late in his life that he had been dreaming of work for years after retirement. He was a tile ace. But in every dream, the job was going badly.

A 2006 Wall Street Journal article (or even the small piece of it not behind the paywall) suggests that such dreams are common. Perhaps they allow us to wonder whether we really did as well as we think we did. Or perhaps they remind us that there’s much not to miss about work. Though in that case, I should have dreams in which I’m grading.

This dream marks my second classroom appearance since retiring. The first came last September.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[I loved teaching as long as I was doing it. But I don’t miss it. Thirty years is enough.]