Lear, window treatments, pie

I was teaching King Lear and running into difficulty trying to find the play in a Complete Works. So I went off on a tangent about the importance of looking up unfamilar words. I had given the students a paragraph about dorp, and almost no one had looked up the word. “Dorp is a plant,” I said. The point of the assignment was to look up dorp, because without knowing what the word means, you couldn’t understand the paragraph.

We had already run ten minutes over, and I now tried to figure out act and scene numbers to assign the next chunk of Lear. But I couldn’t.

I stopped in the department office on my way back to my office, and a colleague handed me a pink while-you-were-out message. A local group of progressives had called, wanting to talk to my son. I explained to my colleague that my son had said that he didn’t want to be paraded around as a model student.

I walked to my office, which I was sharing with a colleague. I said hello, and she replied from her side of a partition. She had a rolling desk chair, which she had bought or requisitioned after attending a faculty orientation about office furniture. “Now I know what kind of chair I need,” she said.

In the hallway, someone walked by and asked where window treatments could be found. I suggested walking to the end of the hallway. “You’re headed in the right direction,” I said. “And now I know that procrastination is a bad habit,” my colleague added from her side of the partition.

I knew I should prepare for my next class, also on Lear, but instead I went out to a basement hallway with a low ceiling to offer apple pie or Nesselrode pie to new faculty. This activity would count as “service.” “Can I talk to you for a minute about one of your colleagues?” the dean asked. She sounded worried.

This is the twenty-fifth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In all but one, something has gone wrong.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)

[Possible sources: Thinking and talking about the podcast series Sold a Story: phonics, meaning, and so-called context clues. Talking about the Atlantic article “The Writing Revolution,” about changes in curriculum at Staten Island’s New Dorp High School. Waiting at a light next to a truck with an enormous window strapped to its side. One of the titles in the Complete Works: Ever Wherever.]