My subconscious apparently is well aware that back-to-school time is rapidly approaching, as I’ve started to have teaching nightmares (again). Every summer as the new academic year approaches, I start getting nervous (again) about teaching: will I be prepared, and will I be able to handle the rigors of an always-daunting course-load?
With a week and a half between now and my first day of face-to-face classes, it’s still too early for daytime thoughts of crashing and burning, and I won’t get that butterfly feeling until the morning of my first class. But in the meantime, my subconscious mind has been stewing, providing two consecutive nights of teaching dreams.
In one dream, I was responsible for teaching meditation to three connecting classrooms of boisterous students, a task that literally ran me ragged as I raced from room to room shouting instructions at the top of my lungs to my talkative, distracted students. In last night’s dream, a shortage of classroom space meant I’d been assigned to teach at Fenway Park, where my delighted students had excellent seats but where I had to keep my back to the game as I tried to keep the attention of my (again) distracted students.
I’ve been teaching online classes all summer, so these dreams haven’t arisen because I’m out of practice. Instead, these dreams point to the difference between teaching online and teaching face-to-face. In my online classes, I don’t need to shout, and I don’t have to compete with other distractions: my students either do their work, or they don’t. In a face-to-face class, though, there are all those eyes staring at you: all those blank faces reflecting back your own insecurities. In the face of all those faces, you have to get your students’ attention, and you have to keep it. You have to wrestle with short attention spans, you have to keep students awake, and you have to keep students engaged in material they aren’t necessarily interested in.
It’s enough to give anyone nightmares just thinking about it.
Click here for a photo-set of images from Ugo Rondinone’s Clockwork for Oracles at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. If you want to see this same work tripped-out under the dreamlike influence of a kaleidoscopic lens, click here. Enjoy!
Hoarded Ordinaries 
Aug 18, 2009 at 11:17 am
I still get the odd nightmare from teaching days AND student days as well, even though those days were so long ago. Rondinone’s work and concept looks interesting, thanks for the introduction! And I love your photos, especially the last one in the group.
LikeLike
Aug 18, 2009 at 4:17 pm
I used to have the standard student nightmare of realizing I had to take an exam in a class I hadn’t attended, but I haven’t had it recently. I guess I “graduated” to teaching dreams.
The mirrors in Rondinone’s work are mounted on a newspaper collage that serves as “wallpaper.” This doesn’t show up very well in the photos, but it is an interesting area of overlap with many of the pieces in the Shepard Fairy exhibit I was there to see, in that many of those pieces also featured newspaper collage.
LikeLike
Aug 19, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Wow! It’s really eye-opening to see things from a teacher’s perspective. I’ve only ever thought of back-to-school from the student’s point of view.
LikeLike
Aug 20, 2009 at 11:36 am
I retired from teaching many years ago, but I still have 2 recurring teaching nightmares. One is that I am supposed to teach a class I know nothing about, and the other is that I discover I was supposed to teach a class that I never met with. I have also had the same exam dream you did.
Sometimes the beginning of term nervousness would go away after the first day. Sometimes it lasted until I looked at the first quizz and discovered how little they knew.
LikeLike
Aug 21, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I gotta go see that museum!
LikeLike