Maybe It Was the Chayote

A couple of days ago, I walked out of my office and there were these three thorny green pear shaped things right next to the stoop in the dirt. I have no idea how they got there. They looked like some sort of tropical fruit. The family in back of my office plays mariachi music full blast on summer afternoons, so I figured these things must have somehow made it over their fence. I picked up the biggest one, about the size of a small pineapple and very heavy, and brought it home.

Saturday, I went on Google to try to identify the thing. I typed "green pear shaped thorns jpg." Google is amazing. A few minutes later I had found the thing in question. It was a chayote, a summer squash grown in Latin America. I decided to cook it up on Sunday, and had my sweetie go online to verify that it was indeed chayote, not some poisonous thing that would kill us on the eve of our anniversary. She said that we ate the stuff in Costa Rica a few years ago.

So I cooked it up last night with some almond/corn meal encrusted sturgeon. Very nice. Then I had this bad dream. Maybe it was the chayote.

I was back at being a professor at my old place. And somehow, I was assigned to teach a biology class on human sexuality. A colleague of mine - by far the biggest lecher in the department - said not to worry. He'd done it before. It wasn't a bad gig. So I took the elevator to the 11th floor classroom in the biology building, except that it clearly wasn't a modern classroom in a tall building, but some 1920s thing with oak desks, a shallow ceiling and bad lighting.

The room was packed. There were a couple of wedding cakes in the back that students were looking at curiously. I asked what the normal class size was for this class from a woman who said she was the "biology proctor." She said about 50. I estimated that there were about 110 students in my class. The proctor also said that she was there to make sure I was doing a good job. She'd given a couple of instructors the hook as of late. Then she introduced me.

I got in front of the class. I had no syllabus and on my lectern was the textbook, the first time I'd seen it. I flipped through the pages. It was all freshman biology kind of stuff, the nuts and bolts of sex. I gave a sigh of relief. This I can do I thought. I started to talk about what the class would entail. A student walked up and turned on an ancient TV - big walnut cabinet thing with a hand dial tuner - in back of me. I turned it off. The class groaned. They wanted to watch TV.

I shot the class an angry look. I looked at their faces. They looked bored beyond belief. They clearly didn't want to be there. This was probably one of those "take a science class to fulfill a requirement" deals. My stomach sank. I remembered a class from hell I taught in my second year, one that was like this. I had handed out homework every week. They resented the work load. They resented me expecting them to have read the text before class. My father died in the middle of that semester. When I came back, I was met with looks of absolute hatred. It was clear they didn't went me back.

I took a big breath. Maybe this class will be better, I thought. I continued to lecture. I said that we'd not only be discussing the biology of human sexuality, but use the text as a launching pad to discuss the social aspects of sexuality in class. The students groaned again. Half of them got out of their seats to leave. They milled around the front of the class. I looked at the proctor. She gave me this look that indicated nothing particularly bad was going on. Out of nowhere my daughter appeared in the class and came up to me. She said, all things considered, I was handling this quite well. I said thanks.

I wasn't worried. I shouted out in a matter of fact way that those who wanted to leave should do so quickly so I could get on with my lecture. Then I woke up.

It should be noted that teaching wasn't something that I liked to do. It wasn't the lecturing. The problem was that most students didn't want to be there and resented anything more than about two to three hours of expected reading and homework a week.

A couple of days ago, I was talking to someone who was in graduate school at Stanford. He said he'd been to Dartmouth and Brown before. He couldn't believe the difference. He called Dartmouth and Brown "social clubs." You went there to make social contacts for later in life and didn't do any work. He said that at Stanford undergraduates were actually taking school seriously. He seemed dumbfounded by this.

I told him I knew all about the social club aspect of private East Coast colleges. I said that from a teaching aspect it was demeaning and dispiriting to be at a place like that. He said he could understand that perspective. I didn't tell him that I was skeptical Stanford was that much different. But that conversation was probably where this dream came from. That and the chayote. ;)