Rollins and Williams and me

The start of another semester: I was teaching a freshman class that was surprisingly lively, with students standing and talking to one another as our time began.

I passed out syllabi, and there were several objections to having quizzes, daily quizzes, but I assured the students that if they did the work of the class from day to day, quizzes would be a ridiculously easy matter. I told them that the highest average for quizzes I had ever seen in a class was 113. That was because every so often I would throw in an extra-credit question, which for some reason only seemed to happen on Fridays. And if you have an average 113 for, say, 25% of your semester grade, it would be really hard not to do well in the class.

I had to end the class after just a few minutes because I was due to escort Sonny Rollins and Mary Lou Williams to a small bandstand in the common area of the building, where they were to play duets. They were guests on campus that day. And as I showed them the way, I woke up.

This is the thirty-first teaching dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. In only two of them has nothing gone wrong. The going-wrong here is not cutting class short; it’s missing out on hearing Sonny Rollins and Mary Lou Williams.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dream posts (Pinboard)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). See also Thomas Nashe. Possible sources: a commercial, repeatedly interrupting 30 Rock episodes, with a teacher returning work, student by student, and thoughts of the David Murray/Mal Waldron album Silence (tenor saxophone and piano). The 113 average is from real life, not from the dream world. I was happy to make day-to-day coursework count, which, unsurprisingly, made for better classes.]