Moving and Teaching
My dream started with me standing between an office building and a moving truck. I was sweating profusely and hurting quite a bit as I hauled large, heavy boxes from the building to the truck. I would talk to the building, pick up a box, and heave it to the truck. The people that I was helping to move weren’t lifting a finger to help because they were busy with closing on their house. Oddly enough, they were doing it at a cheap folding card table that was piled high with papers. Their real estate agent kept telling me that I had to go away because they were going to discuss the purchase price, and she didn’t want me to be privy to that information for some reason.
I constantly told the real estate agent to blow off because I was busy moving stuff. She finally got to the point in the paperwork where they were discussing numbers. That’s when the three of them (husband, wife, and agent) approached me, and told me that I would have to leave. That’s when I realized that I didn’t know any of them, and I blew up. I started screaming and cussing at them because I was busting my ass moving for people that refused to help me, and I didn’t even know them!
I told them that I had other things to do, and that they were on their own for the rest of the move. That’s when I walked into the office building, and down a few hallways. I finally entered a room that was laid out exactly like my algebra 2 classroom that I was in when I was a sophomore in high school.
Instead of walking to one of the student desks, I walked to the teacher’s desk and sat down. I looked down at a syllabus that suddenly appeared on the desk, and I knew that I was going to have to teach the class what was on the syllabus. I looked up from the paper to find that the classroom had filled with students.
I took the syllabus and started walking around the room with it. I kept reading from the syllabus, and telling the students what we were going to cover for the semester. The syllabus made no sense, but I went through it anyway. There were entries on the syllabus that looked like:
- Discuss the philosophical meanings of grok.
- Formulate a thesis on the hidden values of cromulant.
- Find three unique snowflakes and photograph them.
- Learn to ride a horse backwards.
- Grapple with a fellow student until you find a way to choke them out.
- Write a software routine in PHP to generate Fortran code that can be converted to assembler for the development of an artificial intelligence.
It just went on and on like that. None of it really made much sense. As I was explaining it to my students, I could tell that they were just as befuddled as I was.
Before I could make any sense out of the class objectives, my alarm went off. As I was getting ready to go to work, I was still trying to process the syllabus. I finally decided that it would never make sense to me, so I put it out of my mind on the drive into work.
