Teacher Nightmare
I haven’t formally been a teacher since June, but someone forgot to tell my subconscious.
The other night, I dreamt that I was in a classroom again, one that looked familiar, yet out-of-time. It was carpeted, with the kind of dingy, late-’80s/ early-’90s wall-to-wall I used to see in so many South Carolina classrooms, some indecipherable greenish or bluish or grayish color.
The desks were in rows, glossy but faded tan and brown faux-wood tops.
And the students were out of control.
It must have been my first day in that particular classroom, as either a teacher or a sub, because that was all that seemed important: getting the kids under control. Any direction I gave was met with an argument or a passive-aggressive joke. It didn’t seem to matter what subject I was teaching, and I’m not sure I even knew.
And the nightmare part was the way my dream self had reverted to that panicky new-teacher mode which, even late in my career, I would sometimes feel coming on. The one where you get so focused on classroom management that the need to be in control of a classroom containing thirty or more students starts to get away from you, like a spooked horse. Where the reptile part of your brain takes over, where fight/flight/freeze becomes only fight. Where the students become enemies.
Where everyone is laughing at you and everyone in the room has the power to undermine your efforts.
It’s a terrible feeling that, if it breaks free of the reigns, can lead to bad teaching decisions, and bad human interactions. Usually, it doesn’t, but in this dream it was getting to that point.
Looking around that unfamiliar room, seeing leering faces, distracted phases, oppositional faces. Faces that represented more about my own fears and insecurities than the faces of real students. In the dream, many bad, uncomfortable moments with real students and real classrooms (especially as a substitute teacher)
I started to make examples of students, to send them to the office (something that I rarely did in real life, since in my experience real-life students, when told to go to the office, simply go wherever they want, and since real-life front offices aren’t set up to deal with disruptive students). This “worked” at first, in the sense that the students who had to leave were upset and the students who stayed behind were now motivated by something like fear, but then students started to refuse to go.
In this dream— as in many real life classrooms— there didn’t seem to be the option to call anyone for assistance. I’m not sure anything outside of that musty classroom existed in any concrete way. And while the students weren’t doing anything explicitly harmful— no one was hurting anyone physically, and the only one being harmed emotionally was the control freak trying to run the class— the feeling of anxiety and dream-menace just got more and more intense.
I awoke relieved that I didn’t have to go to a classroom that day, that I didn’t have to fight that battle. I reflected on the many years of tension, anxiety, and even trauma that was my experience in public schools. It drove home two important lessons for me: I didn’t regret those years, because they certainly made me a better person, and I also didn’t regret this extended break from that anxiety and tension.
That dream battle probably didn’t represent a real-life battle with students. The difficult thing about teaching is not, generally speaking, the students themselves (of course, there are exceptions), but the way the system often drops us into— or even places us into— conflict with students.
The average first-year teacher, for example, is dropped into a classroom with either one or several groups of students for about seven hours a day. Given average class sizes in South Carolina, for example, that’s probably around 20-30 complete strangers. And for everyone irrationally frothing at the mouth about “SEL” and demanding that teachers return to teaching “just reading and math,” it probably hasn’t dawned on them that teaching involves, firstly, winning over that group of complete strangers enough that they will listen to you teach, enough that they will trust that you have their best interests at heart.
Many of those strangers will have major intellectual, emotional, and/ or physical roadblocks. Some will come to the classroom with experiences of trauma that make it difficult or impossible for them to trust a stranger. Some will come with severe attention issues that make it difficult or impossible to focus on a task or listen to or read instructions. Some will come with life experiences that have left a massive chip on their shoulders, and anger they are too inexperienced or too hurt to deal with in productive ways.
And you, the teacher, have been placed there in opposition to them. You have been told to treat them, regardless of their issues— documented or otherwise— as metaphorical outputs in an assembly-line of learning. Knowledge goes in, test “data” comes out. Rinse and repeat.
If they are confused or frustrated or angry about being dehumanized in this way, you, the teacher, are to break their spirits in some way.
In the George Orwell essay “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell recounts his time as a military representative of the British empire in what was then called Burma. Orwell knows that the local population views him with disdain, perhaps even hate, and he finds himself, despite his supposed anti-imperialist sentiments, hating them in return, writing, “All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.”
I’ve occasionally heard teachers, in private, and usually at low moments, talk about students this way. I don’t think it comes from a malicious place— most teachers could not make it through a single week of school without a general feeling of positive regard for kids— but from a place of frustration and fear.
Orwell’s essay probably reflects the attitude of a lot of well-meaning educators: philosophically, he believes he is part of a problematic system. But practically, he is frustrated to the point of prejudice and violent hatred by that very system he is helping maintain, and his emotions are directed in the exactly wrong direction1. When an elephant goes “must” in the area and tramples several people to death, Orwell feels he has been placed in a position where if he cannot demonstrate his power before the people by brutally killing the elephant, it will show his weakness before them.
That’s what being a teacher felt like sometimes, like the job was to colonize the bodies and minds of students who often had legitimate reasons to distrust or oppose me. That dream the other night brought it back forcefully, and reminded me why it was so hard for me to continue to do the job.
Fortunately, the kind of education reformers who actually find public education valuable have made significant progress over the years in bringing conversations about this conflict— between the mandate to control students and the mandate to empower students. But unfortunately, one of the central motivations behind attacks on “CRT,” “woke indoctrination,” “obscene materials,” and whatever else extremist political activists like Chris Rufo are calling it this week, is the upending of this progress. Attacks on “DEI,” and prohibitions against other kinds of diversity training, social emotional learning (SEL), and other attempts to address the conflict, are attacking our ability to keep and make education a human enterprise. The banning of books and materials that acknowledge the reality of diverse experiences2 and perspectives is an attack on the practice of seeing each other as more human.
It’s important to point out here that Orwell, the man, was complicated, to put it euphemistically. He was a leftist and a socialist who informed (sort of) on other leftists. He was an anti-imperialist who, in this very essay, helped perpetuate racial stereotypes against non-Europeans. He was an anti-totalitarian who at times expressed anti-Semetic views. He was a man who—according to D.J. Taylor’s Orwell: the New Life—may have had same-sex relationships as a young man, and who certainly had queer friends, who frequently said and wrote horribly homophobic things.
For just one recent example, Horry County just banned or restricted the books Gay and Lesbian History for Kids, Between the World and Me, and The Bluest Eye (which is perhaps the most-represented modern text on the AP Language and Composition exam. The same district had already banned or restricted at least thirteen other books, including “This Book is Gay”. Across the state, and across the country, a substantial drive in book bans is eliminating LGBTQ+, Black, and Jewish perspectives (as well as those of other marginalized groups) from the public sphere.