A guest lecture

I had a guest lecturer coming to talk to my class. When I walked into the room, the guest was already there, standing at the front of the room, ready to begin. I said I first wanted to take a minute or two to show my students how I had solved a problem with a sentence. I handed out strips of paper with the sentence, which was about Lorine Niedecker’s poetry, and had something to do with making clear the difference between “blue-black and green” and “blue, black, and green.”

I took a seat and looked for my copy of the sentence in the sheaf of papers I’d brought to class and found another strip of paper with a much longer sentence about political philosophy. And I realized that there was nothing in it about colors. I asked the student sitting next to me if I could borrow his strip of paper. I had just handed out copies, but he didn’t have one.

Then a student two desks away volunteered how much he liked Simon and Garfunkel. Yes, I said, Paul Simon’s songs really hold up, though I always thought that Simon and Garfunkel’s albums suffer from too much production.

Half an hour of class time had now gone by. Twenty minutes left.

Another student volunteered to let me borrow her strip of paper. It was, she explained, in her underwear. She proceeded to remove her bloomers from under her dress — yes, bloomers, bright pink, made of crepe — and handed them to me. I asked her if she could remove the piece of paper herself.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)

[This is the twenty-third teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. In all but one, something has gone wrong.]