Hateful Math

I had the strangest dream recently.

I was transported back to high school. oddly, it was to a class which I did fairly well in: calculus.

Stranger still, even my dream I realized that I had taken the class before. For some reason, though, I wholly accepted the fact that I was taking it again and likely would not do as well at it as before.

Then the teacher walked in (played in my dream by none other than my actual high school calculus teacher), and the dream took a dramatic turn of events far different from real life events.

The teacher -- I'll call her "Rev" -- walked in and announced (quite explicitly) that she didn't particularly like our class, and that there was a distinct possibility that she would be quitting teaching in order to avoid having to deal with us.

Obviously, this came as quick a shock to me, as usually calculus students were among the more better-behaved ones in my high school. (You didn't usually get to taking a calculus class by goofing off in your studies.) She told us she needed to think about it, but that she would quite soon get in touch with us about whether we would, in fact, be taking the class from her that year.

In the next part of my dream, we sat before yet another of my high school math teachers (this one, "Mas," was my Algebra II teacher). I can't explain why we were in a different math class while still not knowing what happened with Rev and the calculus class, but there we were, kind of biding time, when Rev walked in and announced that, in fact, she would not be teaching our class. In fact, she hated us and wanted nothing to do with us.

This is, of course, what many high school kids dream of: having a particularly challenging class cancelled. But calc is usually an elective, so those of us signed up for it probably wanted to take it, and as such, my dream permeated with the counterintuitive situation wherein a class full of math geeks was upset at not being able to study math.

At one point, she turned to Mas, and complained to him along the lines of, "I just can't do it. These kids need too much help. I had to review Reeve's theorem with them, for goodness sake!" and Mas gasped a response, "they didn't already know Reeve's theorem? Good heavens!"

(To my knowledge, the Reeve's theorem, in fact, does not exist. And I certainly don't remember Rev trying to review it with us in my dream. Which is just as well, because, as I said, I don't know that one exists. It would have been difficult for me to have a dream where a teacher reviews with me a theorem I don't even know.)

Somehow, this dream has left me feeling remarkably dissed (because I actually enjoyed my high school calculus experience) and a little disoriented.