Up late grading

I was sitting on the sofa, bent forward, grading “term papers.” I had a juice glass filled with bourbon to help in the endeavor. I held the glass in one hand and graded with the other, with the papers on my knees. Ten or twelve papers, all awful. How even to begin commenting? One student had submitted a legal pad, with the cardboard backing still attached. The “paper” in this case was nothing more than meager notes from class, really just isolated words: Myth. A word. Sacred. I didn’t go beyond the first page. It was two or three in the morning, and I was done grading.

This is the seventh teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

[There’s considerable anecdotal evidence that work dreams in retirement tend to go badly.]