Any change in leadership, however welcome, is bound to spawn some anxiety--which may explain the bizarre nightmare from which I struggled to extricate myself last night.
I dreamed that the soon-to-be-ex-President of the College paid a surprise teaching-evaluation visit to a Latin class in which I was trying to teach a bunch of bored students how to form the instrumental case--and he fell asleep in my class.
How ridiculous is that? Let me count the ways:
1. By the time classes resume in the fall, this President will have no authority over me. He's leaving! I saw the moving van hauling away all his possessions just the other day!
2. The President plays no part in evaluating teaching, and in fact I've never known him to visit a class except as an invited guest speaker.
3. Class visits for the purpose of evaluating teaching are arranged in advance--no surprises!
4. Unless our new leadership institutes post-tenure review for full professors nearing retirement, it's unlikely that anyone will visit my class to evaluate my teaching ever again.
5. Latin? The only Latin that has been taught here in this century is the one-credit-hour online Medical Latin courses offered for pre-med students.
5. Me, teach Latin? I took one semester of Latin around 1985 while my husband was in seminary because spouses could take a certain number of classes for free and I thought Latin would be useful in my graduate studies. I was both the only female and the only non-seminarian in the class, and I still vividly recall the wave of titters when I incorrectly translated a sentence thus: "Do not expect my arm to be around you or yours to be around me." I don't recall whether Latin has a separate instrumental case or how I would teach such a thing, but the question is unlikely to arise in waking life because I'm never going to teach Latin.
6. He fell asleep in my class. Wait, that could actually happen.
Our new President and Provost begin work July 1, and if I'm accounting for all the interims, I think this will be my eighth Provost and my fourth President, which suggests either that we're tougher on Provosts or that it's more difficult to dislodge a problematic President. I've seen a wide range of leadership styles and skill levels, and on the whole, I prefer a leader who is competent but prickly to one who is incompetent but kind. Add a little evil to the mix and it gets more complicated: an incompetent but benign leader may be annoying, but a competent but malignant leader can be downright dangerous.
I've met the new Provost and heard great things about the new Interim President and I am confident that they're the right people for the job, but the path of change is rarely without its potholes. If my subconscious mind feels the need to wrestle with some underlying anxiety, so be it.
Besides, this nightmare scenario isn't really all that scary. If you really want to hear me scream, wait until I dream about visiting a class to evaluate someone else's teaching--but this time, I'm the one who falls asleep.
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