dream_tutoring e_o_i I'm online with earphones in, listening a pair of twins tell me about the parts of a standardized test they need the most work on. The test's name didn't survive the dream-wake transition. The students' names and ages are similarly unclear: one's male and one's female, but I'm not sure if they're in high school or college. Anyway, the guy has problems with the section about identifying five-sided shapes. I have a book about the test, but I hardly glanced at this part. I put him on hold a second, scan the Wikipedia article. Each shape has a technical name: a "house shape" has one, a "caved-in house shape" another. Being able to identify them quickly is supposed to prove something about mental agility. It probably doesn't, but that's how these sort of tests justify themselves. Besides, I don't know what the generic technical name for a five-sided shape is. Quadrilateral is for four-sided shapes, and pentagon doesn't seem equivalent. Quintuplets? No, that word's for people. These ones are only twins. I unmute myself, ask the girl what she thinks of the Roget or Robert book. The one that's supposed to provide a guide to this test, the one I have on my bookshelf. "It's not the best," she says. But now I'm flipping through it, searching frantically for ideas. What I should have done, I know know, was to prepare beforehand. To make my own sample test. It's not actually that hard of a test, this one - correcting the underlined words in a sentence, identifying shapes - but it takes a long time to make tests. Would I get paid for it? I should. I should be getting paid for the prep work I'm doing right now, even though my students expect me to be talking to them. I'm doing my job. I go outside and sit on the step. It's warm, sunny. Then I glance at my watch, which informs me there are 5-10 minutes before the class is over. Panic strikes. I've wasted so much time. What will I say to them? Claim an internet outage? WAS the internet out? Or did I just lose focus and wander away? What will I tell my boss?? ...It was a relief to wake up and realize, after a second, that the test was imaginary. 220715 ... epitome of incomprehensibility ("Know now," that was supposed to be, but "know know" has a rhythm. Pretend it's deliberate!) The end part is a common nightmare - using "nightmare" loosely: that I'm tutoring and I lose focus completely, drifting off into my thoughts, into another activity. I guess it combines dream logic with my real-life experiences and fears. No, I don't usually lose focus much in classes, but it takes me a long time when I have to file some report or send the student an email with attachments after class. These things typically aren't urgent, no, but why NOT do them fast? Why CAN'T I? Frustration. 220715 ... e_o_i I read this before I went to sleep last night, so I guess it influenced my dream: I was doing online tutoring from a backyard picnic table that no longer exists and telling myself, "Stay focused, stay focused - everything will get confused if you don't focus." ... But I went to this page in the first place because of my dream the night before last, recalled in more detail. It began as online tutoring too. The teenage boy on the other end kept moving his camera around, showing me his family members, and so I stepped away to get some water while he was goofing off. Then my boss' face appeared on the screen, chiding me for not being there. "You shouldn't step away from the camera." So I didn't. I stepped into the camera. Or something. Whatever I did, I ended up in the students' house, where he was doing a crossword puzzle at the dining room table. "I thought you were doing math," I said. He shook his head. "No, English. See, I have to find the words." I looked. The clue to one word was a small picture of a woman in lab goggles. The boy started to write "scientist," then hesitated. "No, 'scientist' makes sense," I encouraged, the "c" already there from a crossing word. He shook his head again. "No, the word needs a feminine ending." I was about to say English didn't have those, but then I saw that the crossword was in Spanish. I was embarrassed I hadn't noticed that before. (The student did say "English" - as if every language class was English.) He wrote down the feminine ending: -in. Now there was a z and it was "Szientistin." I thought it didn't look quite Spanish, but I didn't want to say anything. (It's the German ending, though the actual German would be "Wissenschaftlerin.") Then, without explanation, I was back at my computer, looking at the list of library books I had out - neatly centralized, all the titles on one page. Convenient, right? But an unfamiliar title caught my eye, next to "Lachine Library" - I hadn't been to that place in years. I checked the title again. It was something about a Hanukkah story, only the word was spelled "Hanükah" - making me realize right away that it wasn't in fact a Hanukkah story, but an antisemitic conspiracy disguised as one. Also, it wasn't even a book, just a file with several pages. Also ALSO, it was borrowed as a "game," which meant I was racking up fees. So far I had more than $26 owing. I suspected it was indexed somehow to the price of bitcoin. I suspected that the boy had grown restless with his conservative Christian family, especially with their homeschooling. I suspected that he had started hacking into people's library accounts and causing mayhem. You have to watch out for things like that. 240726 ... e_o_i edits (And if any reader is game to game, I misplaced an apostrophe in the story above - see if you can find it.) 240726 what's it to you? who go blather from