Educational Nightmares

I think that most everyone has bad dreams about school, even long after we are done attending classes. My dreams often include an embarrassing state of undress, a corridor full of people and the inability to find a classroom or locker or paper to hand in.

Or realizing that I have an exam in a class I forgot to attend all year.

Or looking at homework that should be easy to do, but requires skills I have suddenly forgotten.

In my waking life I have a graduate degree, but in my sleeping life I might have forgotten to finish a class in high school which, if not rectified, could result in my losing all my degrees. There always seems to be one more classes to return to, one more paper to write, one more test to take. I understand that these kinds of dreams are the sub-conscious mind's way of processing unfinished business, but I sometimes wonder if I will ever finish processing the student life.

Then last night I dreamt that I was on my way to give a final exam for a class (finally I was the teacher) but I couldn't remember teaching them anything. It was a short-course (only 5 weeks or so) in a culinary class. I was fully dressed, but much like waking life I was carrying around mounds of papers. I couldn't remember teaching food or knife safety, recipes, or anything for the class. Keep in mind that I am generally a writing teacher, so I must have accepted the job to teach the course as a favor at the last minute. In a futile attempt to decide what I was going to test the students on, I visited them in a study group and invited their input which I wrote on a white board. None of them were asking questions about the subject matter of the class; they were asking questions about sentence structure and finding my errors as we went!

Then I visited a jail and spoke with some fascinating people, including a Native American who had wonderful stories to share–none of them were about the culinary arts. I was on my way to the classroom determined to ask the students to write short essays describing what they had learned in class when I woke up.

Apparently I have graduated (pun intended) from nightmares about being a student to nightmares about being a teacher. Lovely. The lesson here could very well be that no matter whether I am a teacher or a student the paperwork feels endless, the tension is ongoing and the deadlines don't stop.

Wonderful.