Old Themes Revisited

Last night, I had a tense dream/borderline nightmare I hadn’t had in a long while.  The basic theme is that I am teaching and the class is slowly unraveling.  I am unable to manage the class and no one is paying attention to the thing I want them to do.  Instead, students just want to socialize.  Usually, this is part of a series of dreams I have right before I start teaching a new semester/course/year/etc.  (Yes, I think I am a little nervous about my next job)

In last night’s version, I was to train new science teachers.  The cohort I was to work with were 50 (yes, FIFTY!) new teachers who looked so young, they seemed like they had only just hit puberty.  They also acted like it.  I remarked to my boss in my dream, “How old are these folks?  They look really young.  Are they really allowed to teach?” And “I don’t know how I am to get collaborations and deep conversations going with that many folks.”

Needless to say, the classroom management issue here was trying to get these FIFTY young folks to focus on the hard task of understanding what it means to teach science, when, really, all they wanted to do was to socialize.  In dreams like this, my approach is to just soldier on with the task I had planned and hope that they will come around to doing it.  I usually wake up before it is done but never at a point where things have turned around or is going well.  Hardly anyone ever comes around in these dreams.  I am thinking that in real life this is probably not the best approach- the students and the teacher living in non-intersecting worlds in the same classroom.  Maybe in cases like this, I might want to have a conversation with the students about the problems I am seeing (and possibly problems they see) and how we as a community of folks can come together to figure out how to get out of these problems.  I wonder if I will be aware enough in the next time I have this dream to do this.  It would be nice to figure out how to "fix" this dream.      

Now I am waiting for the other dream I often have when I am about to teach- the one that involves the never-ending wad of gum.  I cannot even begin to think of how I would get out of that one.