It could be worse

One of my jobs this semester, the one in which I am a TA, or teaching assistant, requires me to teach a section of thirty or so students every Friday. This means I am required to be interesting/entertaining/informative/focused for fifty minutes, all by myself. To give you an idea of how difficult it is for me to focus on one thing for a long or even short period of time, take note that I have been watching Middlemarch, eating strawberry yogurt, and planning what to wear for church all in between writing this paragraph.

Anyway, I was feeling frustrated with myself this weekend for not teaching as well as I wished. I felt my discussion section was poorly organized and boring, and that I had tried to compensate for this by sharing too much personal information and blathering on about things long after the entire class was ready to move on.

I continued to mope about this until last night, when I had a revelation. A dream, actually. In this dream, I was teaching my section, and it was absolutely the most horrible worst-case scenario I could have envisioned. It was so terrible, in fact, that I woke up out of pure frustration/terror, and realized how lucky I was in real life by contrast.

So, how lucky am I?

I'm lucky that my students don't leave the classroom in the middle of my teaching.

I'm lucky that my students don't tear up their homework when I hand it back to them.

 I'm lucky that I don't actually teach in a huge, intimidating auditorium where the lights are low and the students are seated high above me, emphasizing my isolation from them.

Well, I'm lucky that one of my students isn't a long-haired disheveled-looking artist with long hair from Russia who apparently can't speak a word of English and cries when I try to communicate with him in English.

I'm lucky that my students aren't too distracted by how dirty the carpet is to pay attention to my lecturing.

I"m lucky that they don't then leave to go and get one of those old-fashioned carpet cleaning machines to fix the apparently dirty, disgusting, smelly carpet in our room (Seriously. This happened. Why? Do I have an obsession with carpet that I am trying to suppress?).

I'm lucky that my students don't pretend they can't hear me when I yell, "HEY! STOP TALKING! LISTEN TO ME!"

I'm lucky that the boys in my class haven't all decided to play a prank on me by insisting that all of their names are "Josh."

And yes, every single one of these things happened in my dream. No wonder I woke up. Any more and I would have committed suicide, Inception-style.

You're all crazy, and I quit!