Tuesday, July 10, 2007

The Professor’s Anxiety Dream




My dear freshmen,
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You think you have cornered the market on school anxiety?
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The Professor may have been teaching for over 15 years, but when July rolls around, she had better be somewhat prepared for the semester.
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Otherwise, she has The Dream:
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A humungous tree, one of those thick gnarled trees that have been around at least 1,000 years, grows in the middle of The Professor’s classroom.
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Hundreds of students, giggling and pointing to The Professor, pour into the room and hide behind the tree.
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The professor is not wearing a top. In fact, it slowly dawns on her that she is not wearing a bottom, either.
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She tries covering her nakedness with her hands but then gives up. After all, there are situations worse than standing naked in front of hundreds of college freshmen, right?
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(Well, not really, but what can she do but roll with the situation?)
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The Naked Professor looks over her roster—exactly 1,000 students listed for her Writing 101 class.
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“How could they do this to me?” she laments, breaking into a cold sweat, rivulets rolling into no-longer secret places.
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What’s more, The Professor has no syllabus to distribute and can’t remember what was supposed to be on it.
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Her mind is a complete blank—except for the fact that she is totally naked in front of 1,000 sneering freshmen and at least 15 pounds heavier after a bacchanalian summer of food and drink.
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Then she takes another look at her roster: not Writing 101 but Physics 475, a senior seminar having to do Quantum Physics—a field literally a million miles away from her field of expertise.
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Her heart races and—
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And she wakes up.
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She vows to get cracking on that syllabus ASAP.
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Your professors also experience first-day anxiety. After all, you represent the vast unknown; profs have no control who enroll in their classes—
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Einstein or Jack the Ripper?
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Ultimately, most of you will fall somewhere in between.
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And that is what keeps us here and sane.

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The Professor

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