A Recurring Kinda-Nightmare About Teaching

what happens when you get to class and have no idea what you're supposed to be teaching

In a conversation with one of my clients, who I’m helping plan out an Introduction To Philosophy class they will be teaching for the first time, they brought up a bad dream they recently had. It turned out to be rather similar to a recurring kinda-nightmare I had dreamt multiple times many years back, early in my own teaching carreer.

In my dream, I show up for a class I am supposed to teach in a large auditorium, seating perhaps 200 students. I’m wearing dress pants, a button-down shirt, and a jacket and tie, and I brought my dossier along with me, which presumably contains books, papers, and so forth.

There are already a few students sitting in their chairs by the time I arrive, and there are a few small groups of them up near the front, several of those students standing by the podium I’ll be running the class from. They greet me when I come in and start getting myself set up for class. Other students are already streaming in and taking their seats, because class will begin soon.

Suddenly, I realize that I don’t know what class I am there to teach. I also don’t know what I’m supposed to cover or discuss that day. I don’t know what point in the semester we’re at. The shock I feel is similar to that which other people express feeling when they have a much more common dream (which I’ve also had at various points), where you show up to school or work, start going about your day, and then realize that you forgot to put on pants before heading out.

By the time that I was having my own bad dreams, I had been teaching for a bit. Given the number of varied classes I had already taught, and the fact they changed from semester to semester, being confused about precisely which class I and my students were there for could be understandable.

Was it one of those classes that we often call “service classes”, taught as part of a core or general education curriculum, to students pursuing all sorts of majors? For me, that might mean Introduction to Philosophy, Ethics, Critical Thinking, Logic, Religion in American Culture, or World Religions. All of those were staple classes for me. Or was it some more specialized or applied course that I was there to teach that day?

I feel a sense of fear. I can’t let the students know that I don’t know what class we are gathered for in this auditorium. I feel that for them to realize that lack of knowledge on my part will inevitably lead to some sort of loss on my part in relation to my students. Perhaps they will no longer extend me a trust that I actually know what I am talking about. Maybe they will radically question my competence in my field, or more broadly as an educator, or even yet more broadly as a human being. I don’t know what will happen if I’m revealed in my ignorance. I just feel, and specifically fear, that it will be something catastrophically bad.

I realize that I have brought a resource with me that can give me the answer I need. I look in my dossier, hoping that its contents can tell me what class we are currently in. No luck. The books jammed into it clearly have nothing to do with any class I am currently teaching. There’s no grade-book in it. There aren’t any useful papers either.

What do I do in that situation? Already early in my career, I was what you can call a “good talker”. My lecturing in classes has never been the old-school “teacher talks and students listen” format. I cover material, explain and unpack the matters we are studying, but I ask my students questions, engage them in discussion, solicit and consider examples on the fly, and respond to objections, questions, and calls for clarification from my students. So they are already used to me making my classes more conversational.

Class starts. Fortunately, the class session is only scheduled for 50 minutes (3 times a week), rather than one of the longer formats like 75 minutes (twice a week) or 2.5 hours (once a week, seminar style) classes can take. What do I do all that time?

First I try to sound out my students to see if I can figure out what topics we are supposed to be studying, what class we are actually in, where we are in the semester. I make general but perhaps provocative remarks, hoping that one of the students will respond in some way that tells me what we’re up to. I joke around with them. I ask them questions about what’s been on their mind lately. I mention some topics we might be studying, hoping to glean some flash of particular interest or recognition in their faces.

My students in this class are all nice, friendly, earnest, eager to learn. But not a single one of them will provide me with what I’m hoping for. No surprise, since I’m concealing from them what my questions, quips, and remarks are intended to do, to solicit from them the very information I’m supposed to have and be guided by.

So at some point, perhaps ten minutes into this effort, I give up. I have no way of knowing or figuring out what class I am supposed to be teaching. And for the remainder of the class, the bulk of the time I am there, what do I do? I bullshit. I meander around topics and ideas that might bear some connection to what my students expected me to discuss. Certain of the students seem puzzled, but they all follow along as best they can with the eccentric course I’m leading them on.

We make it to the end of the class period, and I feel a sense of deep relief as my students start packing up, since now I can just release them, and head back to my office to figure out for myself what just took place, what class I was supposed to be teaching.

I imagine for many readers, the term that will immediately spring to their mind will be “imposter syndrome”. This is a common worry that many people have, particularly when they are rather new in a position or profession, that other people will see past their facade of competency or knowledge and realize that they are an “imposter”. I won’t say that dreams like this are entirely unconnected with this idea of imposter syndrome. But I don’t think simply classing it under, or attributing it to, imposter syndrome makes sense of these sorts of dreams.

By the time that had these recurring dreams, I was still a relatively new professor. But I already had years of teaching experience and a good track record both for preparing well for class sessions and engaging in lively discussions with my students. Possibly in the back of my mind there were some anxieties akin to imposter syndrome, but the day to day experiences of my teaching career didn’t involve such worries.

I never really did know what to make of these dreams. I experienced them perhaps 4 or 5 times over the course of a week, and then just as unexpectedly as they came to dominate my dreamscape, they ended and never came back. I hadn’t thought of them for quite a while, until my client recounted having their own similar dreams.

Is there some grand idea or important lesson to derive from this sort of dream? Perhaps so, but if there is, it seems that I’m not the person to figure it out. So I’ll just leave off with the account of it here. Perhaps some readers have experienced similar dreams of their own, and have a more robustly developed perspective upon them.