In my dream, I am in a classroom situation. I am a student along with the rest of the class, but I am also one of three students given the special (duty? honor? responsibility?) of grading the tests of all the other students. Each one of the three of us will grade the tests of one-third of the students who took the exam. This means, of course, that the instructor has enough faith in us that the three of us will get an "A" grade on the exam.
The exam has just finished, and the students' test papers are being collected.
The exam asked questions about a famous work of literature. It might have been something like The Odyssey or possibly Shakespeare or similar.
Some of the students are chatting away, now that the test is over, concerning the questions and their approach to answering them. Comments are being made like "I really feel the entire plot pivots on the fact that..." or "Did you think that so-and-so in the story was telling the truth about..."
And I realize that I don't know anything about the questions or opinions being voiced by my fellow students. Which means that I am totally unable to grade the test papers that would be my responsibility to grade. (That is, the papers of one-third of all the students.)
I recall that I had read the assigned piece of literature, but I had only read it once and obviously hadn't read it carefully enough to answer any of the questions being asked on the exam.
I have a choice of trying to fake it for the moment and then try to figure out how to handle the situation once I have the test papers in-hand and have escaped from the classroom -- or simply confessing to the fact that I couldn't grade the tests. And I choose the latter course.
While most of the students (and the instructor) were in the room and chatting away, I get everyone's attention and told them of my own inadequacy to grade the papers. The room got very quiet and a heavy feeling of disbelief came over everyone. "How could Randy have done such an irresponsible thing?" "What do you suppose the instructor's going to do?" "So who's going to grade my paper? I thought I did really well on the exam!" The other students left the room -- some of them glaring at me and some of them giving me a look of pity.
I feel terrible that I had let everyone down, but okay that I had done the right thing and allowed the instructor to reassign the papers I was to grade -- and the everything would go okay. As far as the test results. But that my fellow students would remember my screw-up for a very long time.
So what do I do now?
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