End-of-term nightmare
Last night I had a worse-than-standard "teaching anxiety" dream: I dreamed I was reading my students’ course evaluations, and all their comments were not only negative, but horribly detailed. One said something like "We could tell she’d read a lot about Lacan [not that I’ve ever taught Lacan], but this class was, on the whole, not a very good idea." Another comment criticized my posture, my body language, the state of my teeth, and my smile, which was described as a "grimace."
Even worse, I was somehow reading these evaluations on the web, using my laptop, and I was in the classroom at the time with the students in question, which gave me a sudden flash of guilty panic: Oh my God, I shouldn’t be reading these yet, the course isn’t over!
It was awful. I’m knocking back coffee in a slightly frantic effort to wake all the way up. At the same time, though, I remember a certain feeling of grim triumph in the dream: here’s the proof, I thought to myself, looking at the evaluations, that I’ve got to change careers. If anyone asks why I want to leave teaching, I can just show them these comments, and they’ll have to agree with my decision.
All the same, I’d rather go back to dreaming my standard-issue bizarro dreams, like the one two nights ago in which I went to see the movie 28 Days Later at the movie theater (I’ve never seen it) and then somehow I was in the movie itself, plotting ways to flee from the killer zombies. Somehow, my unconscious grasps the distinction between fact and fiction, because the movie-zombie dream was much less scary than the evaluation dream.
Ugh. What a most un-fun dream! My own teaching/student anxiety dreams always centered on being late and unable to find where the class was being held. Oddly, though, after one string of them I actually learned my way around the dream college — at which point they stopped. Maybe you’ll dream of leaving teaching! Or evaluating the students! 🙂
Repetitive vividness in dreams can be downright scary. I had a serious stream of them for a while and it became quite unnerving. I read it could be a side effect of Vitamin B12 (or something in the complex) build-up, which I was taking at the time. Interesting that even in the dream, you were working it out that this was evidence that you should get out of teaching.
NIGHTMARE ON SCHOOL STREET
Something else I’m not terribly proud about: yes, I felt sympathy, but there is also some kind of guilty pleasure in knowing that teachers go bump in the night too.