The new school year years begins!
We have had nothing but cool air for the last few weeks, so that it has seemed as if autumn was already here, long before Paze and John went back to work today. Yesterday, it seemed as if we had entered the monsoon season–or an old-fashioned Vancouver winter–since it poured unceasingly all day. It’s never like that in Montreal–until recently, that is; traditionally, you hardly needed an umbrella, but could just wait a few minutes until the rain stopped.
John and Paze were pacing the floor with nervousness yesterday in nervous apprehension, as usual. Both had upset stomachs. You would have thought they were going to be beheaded today rather than going back to teach. And people think that it’s only kids who don’t want to go back to school in the Fall!
I have stopped feeling guilty that I’m not going back, too. But last night I dreamed that I was worried about whether I should be back in class or not; I kept feeling a nagging feeling that I was, and had to keep telling myself that I was retired. In the meantime I was getting on buses, finding myself on the wrong bus, getting off, getting on another, and so on.
I still have teaching anxiety dreams, in which I’m trying to teach a class under bad conditions—usually without a proper classroom. My students and I wander from room to room, sometimes even out of doors, looking for a place for them to sit down. Meanwhile, I keep losing some students and gaining new ones. Often I have no text book and neither do they, and I’m desperately trying to figure out what I can teach them in such a situation. These dreams come close to some experiences I actually had while teaching for 32 years; there were terms when the textbooks didn’t come in on time, and I had to print stuff for the students. And times when the printing wasn’t ready in time for class, and I had to do something with them anyway (usually show a movie). And when the movie tape broke or the machine broke, and I was stuck with nothing and had to dismiss them. And there were times when the classroom situation was so bad that I thought I’d go mad. One year I was assigned a classroom with plastic, foldable walls on each side, so that the three small rooms could be turned into a large room if necessary. Classes were being taught in the rooms on each side of me. And, as luck would have it, on one side of us there was a course in something concerning sex being taught, and the teacher’s fluting voice carried right through the plastic wall as she explained about penis and vagina matters. And my students were all leaning in that direction, paying me no heed at all. Or the teacher on the other side was showing a film. Arrrg! In Fall 1988 I had one class of 37 students in what had been a storeroom but had been turned into a classroom at the last moment. It had no windows, and was so tightly packed with chairs that it would have been quite a disaster if there had been a fire in the building; students could hardly get past one another to get to their seats, and there was nothing resembling an aisle. And I did occasionally lead a class of students in search of a classroom empty at that time period, and install them there, since it was better, only to discover at exam time that it actually belonged to a Phys. Ed class which had spent most of its time in the gym and yet had been assigned a classroom better than mine.
And yet, I think I had a great career, despite all that. In that very small room, for example, I taught “Detective Fiction” to a great group of kids. We all sort of felt that we were in survival mode, and the best came out of us all. I had to sit on my desk, or lean up against it, since there was no room to move around at the top of the class, but I still enjoyed myself tremendously. I still remember standing on that desk at one point, illustrating how a character in one of our mystery novels couldn’t have hung himself. I was making a noose in the long leather belt of my favorite brown corduroy dress, then putting it around my neck….. The students were laughing riotously. And of course, at that moment, someone from the Registrar’s Office appeared at the door with papers to hand out for students who hadn’t confirmed their attendance in class. What a laugh!
Ah well. I don’t miss it, but I do look back fondly at many good moments, and am happy when I hear Paze tell of such moments in her classes today. Her course in Children’s Literature is so popular that she has 41 students this term (when there should only be about 35). And no one ever drops out, either. And Paze has unorthodox ways of teaching, too, that can make the classes fun at times for both her and her students. An d of course, she’s teaching something the students love, as I was. We both agree that the irony of the situation is that a popular teacher had more papers to mark. Yet that is preferable to teaching a bunch of bored students who seem to hate you. (I recall fellow teachers who had half their students drop out in the first week, and were teaching 20 students all term when I was teaching 47; still, I at least had fun, and felt that buoyancy that is possible when you know your students like you.)
