When I was in college I would have dreams, from time to time, in which I would show up at class only to find that we were taking a test, and that I had no idea about the subject. I would receive my test booklet, the hour would start, and everyone would get to work — except for me, because I was completely unprepared.<\/p>\n
Shortly after I got my Ph.D., I found myself teaching at NYU. Now I was on the other side — not the one taking the tests, but the one giving them. I was, as they say, the one in power.<\/p>\n
Yet the dreams continued. Only this time I would show up to give a lecture, only to find that I was completely unprepared, and had no idea what to lecture about. A sea of expectant student faces would stare out at me, and I would have not a clue what to do or say.<\/p>\n
Thinking back on all this, what fascinates me is that these are essentially the same dream. The only difference between them is in the societal role that I am playing. In every other way, they are the same.<\/p>\n
What continues to surprise me — I’m not sure why it surprises me, but it does — is that my dream self would bother to make such a fine distinction between “student” and “teacher”. After all, you would think that the terrified three year old in my soul would not care about such petty details.<\/p>\n
Yet evidently he does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was in college I would have dreams, from time to time, in which I would show up at class only to find that we were taking a test, and that I had no idea about the subject. I would receive my test booklet, the hour would start, and everyone would get to work … Continue reading “Dream job”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15649"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15649"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15651,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15649\/revisions\/15651"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}