[Note: I actually dreamed this on Monday morning but I needed time to edit before sharing it with the group so I share it this morning.]
I had one of those crying dreams this morning, the rare kind. It was the first day of the second semester at UT Austin and for some reason I had switched classes with a colleague and I was teaching his beginning French class and he was teaching mine.
A student with striking, cartoonish hair was standing next to me in front of the class. I decided to start talking about his perfect hair. Why not? It was amazing hair, but everything else was drab, even the student. I remember excitedly wondering where I could take this story, even though I didn’t have a script.
But I had made a big mistake. In my haste to get the story about the hair going and show off the power of stories to this new group of what looked like privileged white suburban type college kids, I had forgotten to train them in the Classroom Rules. I had forgotten to do all the norming stuff about personalization and classroom discipline that I always do in real life to start the year.
Bad move. After about five minutes of excitedly talking about this guy’s hair, probably way too fast, I noticed, in a kind of clouded fake smile horror, that the room suddenly had less students in it and that the ones who were left were sitting on desks talking with each other and no one was listening to me.
I was devastated and didn’t know what to do. This was a teacher’s worst nightmare. I debated just walking out. I was really torn. I wasn’t sure if I had to finish that semester with this new group to be able to retire at the end of that semester, or if I could just walk out and retire right there.
I left the room. I walked across the beautiful UT campus and looked for God. I wanted to talk to Him. He walked by in the form of a friend, but I knew he was really God, and He noticed me and I knelt down and I just started crying.
I cried for a few minutes, with big crocodile tears. I tried to explain what had happened in that class but I couldn’t. Only tears, big sad tears with garbled words, would come out. I tried so hard to explain my tears but I couldn’t.
God let me cry and then I was alone again so I decided to go smoke a cigarette with all the other students in the street who were getting ready for their next classes. They were in the street because no smoking was allowed on campus.
I wanted to tell the smokers what had just happened in that class but I could see that they had their own problems, that they didn’t want to be in school either, so I just smoked by myself. We all just stood in the street smoking. I don’t smoke in real life.
Then I went to try to find someone official to talk with about that class and whether I could retire. If I had just explained the rules to those spoiled kids and done what I always do on the first day of class each year, everything would have been fine, they would have listened and we would have made a good story about that guy’s shiny Jimmy Neutron hair.
As I write this, I have the wonderful realization that follows a dream that it didn’t happen. The real last class in my career was actually taught last week. Yesterday I gave my last final exam, which I threw in the trash as soon as the kids walked out. Friday I’m done.
Why did I have this dream? Possibly it was helping me by offloading classroom stress from this year and thereby bringing me into balance. That is what is good about nightmares – when you wake up from them you realize that they never happened and you feel so good.
Who knows? Maybe my career was just a dream too. It was a nightmare in some ways and a beautiful dream in others. There were moments in class that were really bad and others that were like being in heaven. When I couldn’t go in I did anyway. I smiled even if I couldn’t. Teaching made me man up to life.
All I have to do now is row my boat a few more feet to Friday and I will finally make sturdy contact with the land and wake up. I’ve waited for Friday for decades.
Maybe that’s all teaching really is, a long trip on the Ocean of Fear and Insecurity, the Ocean of Giving More Than I Ever Thought I Could. Maybe on Friday, on dry land again, after I hand in my keys and leave my school building for the last time, I will realize that the whole thing never happened. I don’t know.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu4leg2Yp_A