School Dreams
May. 7th, 2017 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogFor some time now, I've been having the first regularly recurring bad dream I think I've ever had. I'm going to school - I'm not sure whether it's undergrad or grad school - and there's a class that I haven't been attending because I've been so swamped with work. I made an intentional choice to concentrate my efforts on other classes, knowing that I'd have to face the repercussions of that decision at the end of the semester. I always had some hope that I'd find time to catch up with the work if I could make enough progress in my other classes, but I was never able to. In the dream, the time of the reckoning is at hand; the professor will soon know that I haven't been keeping up with the course (it's usually some form of mathematics) and I'm facing the fact that I now have no option but to fail the course. I think that, in that cloudy five or ten minutes after waking up, I still feel like I'm facing that unavoidable conversation with the professor who I will have deeply disappointed.
It feels a little bit like the conversation I had with a professor at Syracuse where I asked for an extension on my term paper due to health (anxiety and depression) issues. I'd been putting off work on that paper to concentrate on other classes because I thought it would go more quickly than the others. Not, I quickly saw when I started on it, as quickly as I'd hoped. I knew that it would take longer than I thought it would (everything does; I learned that in tech support), but I felt like I didn't have a choice on my scheduling. The professor wasn't thrilled by the idea of an extension, though she granted it, and I felt like I was being a terrible student and disappointing her.
Regardless of all of that, it was a fun topic for me. The class was on how public policy is formed and changed over time. I wrote a paper about the various social, political, and practical factors that went into shaping early public policy (1910s and 1920s especially) on automobiles. I wish I'd had time to read more thoroughly on the topic. But time was a precious, precious commodity.
It feels a little bit like the conversation I had with a professor at Syracuse where I asked for an extension on my term paper due to health (anxiety and depression) issues. I'd been putting off work on that paper to concentrate on other classes because I thought it would go more quickly than the others. Not, I quickly saw when I started on it, as quickly as I'd hoped. I knew that it would take longer than I thought it would (everything does; I learned that in tech support), but I felt like I didn't have a choice on my scheduling. The professor wasn't thrilled by the idea of an extension, though she granted it, and I felt like I was being a terrible student and disappointing her.
Regardless of all of that, it was a fun topic for me. The class was on how public policy is formed and changed over time. I wrote a paper about the various social, political, and practical factors that went into shaping early public policy (1910s and 1920s especially) on automobiles. I wish I'd had time to read more thoroughly on the topic. But time was a precious, precious commodity.
