I’ve been retired from teaching for more than 20 years, yet I often dream that I am still (or maybe yet again will be) a teacher. But although I loved teaching, my teacher dreams always fall in the “bad dream” category.
Oh, not because the kids are rebellious in the dream. No, in all my “bad” teaching dreams, it’s never the kids’ fault.
It’s always me.
Sometimes the bell rings to start class and I can’t find the classroom. Or I’m teaching from a textbook I’ve never seen before. Or the words are in some language I can’t read.
Still, despite all the “failed lesson” dreams, sometimes I wake up laughing.
Last week I dreamed I was in a prison, trying to teach a card trick to about fifteen hardened criminals. “Take a card and look at it,” I say as I pass a deck around, “but don’t show it to anyone else.”
“Jack of clubs!” one convict shouts out when he looks at his card.
“No, see, nobody else is supposed to know what your card is.”
“Oh,” he says. “Then six of hearts!”
I shake my head. “See, this is why you’re in prison,” I say.
And I wake up laughing.
OK, that “bad” dream was kind of fun, but in most of the others I’m just trying to show up and do my job. But I can’t. For countless reasons.
I’m told I was a pretty good teacher over the 35 years that I taught high school kids, and I’m still in touch with many of them, from Christmas cards to lunches.
Last week I met with Philip, who emailed me out of the blue and said he wanted to buy me lunch sometime. Philip turns 65 next week. I taught him when I was still in my 20s.
Two weeks ago, I had lunch with Jim, who also called me out of the blue about 3 years ago. We’ve had lunch at least once a year since then. Nearing 60 now, he delights in reminding me word for word of something I said in class when he was a sophomore, some joke or lesson he still uses in his own life today.
Last summer I lunched with Carmela and Melissa, and then a barbecue with Amy, none of whom I had seen in decades, and it went pretty much the same way.
So I guess I must have done something right in the classroom way back then. And yet, time after time, that’s not the feeling I wake up to after yet another teacher dream, which seem to happen more often lately. Don’t ask me why.
Maybe it’s because I always felt as if I was “faking it” as a teacher, and nobody seemed to catch on.
As a kid in grammar school, then high school, my teachers all seemed so capable, competent, and brim-full filled with knowledge. In college and graduate school, training to become a teacher, I wondered when all that would kick in with me.
But it never did. Or at least I never felt that it did.
And so I showed up day after day to teach, pretending that all that wisdom was in there inside of me, hoping that none of my students would catch on and point out that I didn’t really belong up here in front of the class. That maybe I should seek employment somewhere else.
It was last night’s “somewhere else” dream that got me writing this story today.
I dreamed I was supposed to be teaching a book called “Travel,” but I’d never even opened it myself. So, winging it, I tell the class: “Take out two sheets of paper.”
And they do, obediently. They always do.
I say to them, “On top of one sheet, write: ‘Here.’ On the other sheet write: ‘There.’ Now, write each of the following words on whichever sheet you think it best belongs:
Happy.
Boring.
Safe
Scared.
Comfortable.
My future.”
I am heading, I guess, toward a writing assignment or class discussion about travel. You know the kind of thing: You’re a kid living in the town where you were born, but how do you want your future to look? Is “here” a good place to live? Would you travel to find some other “there” to spend your life?
Maybe I’d take the lesson further: What would a teenager in Ukraine write? What about time travel — does a future or past “there” look better than “here and now”?
As teacher dreams go, this one isn’t bad. Maybe I’ll fake my way through this lesson, too.
And then I realize that I have 30 kids sitting with pen in hand, and each of them comes from a different home than the one I was born into. Each of them lives in a different body than the one I live in.
That sad-faced girl with an abusive parent at home — what can she say about “here”?
That timid boy who is gay but still too afraid to come out — what does he write about “there”?
I jolt awake, my heart hammering. For a moment I don’t know where I am, or even who I am. How did I get here?
As the dream fades, my heart rate slows, and I come fully awake.
It’s OK. I’m here. I’m fine.
But I shudder with the thought of how many of my 10,000 students faked how fine their “here” was going.
Would a “real” teacher have seen the truth and found a way to help them find a better “there”?
I leave bed to write this, hoping a retired “faking it” teacher helped them enough, just by doing his best every day.
Being a teacher is hard work — even when you’re not teaching anymore.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com
