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Not a perfect joke but an extremely apt cartoon. For several years my husband has been giving me a New Yorker cartoon calendar for Christmas. Last year the cartoons were increasingly so unfunny or even incomprehensible that I asked him to skip the calendar, but he gave me one anyway. So far the mix has been about the same, but yesterday's was a real winner: condenaststore.com/feat…
Not a perfect joke but an extremely apt cartoon. For several years my husband has been giving me a New Yorker cartoon calendar for Christmas. Last year the cartoons were increasingly so unfunny or even incomprehensible that I asked him to skip the calendar, but he gave me one anyway. So far the mix has been about the same, but yesterday's was a real winner: https://condenaststore.com/featured/a-special-welcome-meredith-southard.html
I had this very nightmare one night this week, except it was college and I had only been to the class once, at the very beginning of the year, and now it was finals and the teacher and everyone else in the class glared at me like I had some nerve for even showing up, and I wished I had not. I could not even make sense of the exam questions, or what subject it was. Panic set in. Don't know why after being out of school for so many decades I should dream this, but I hope I don't again.
That this is a universal nightmare is why the cartoon resonates. If this is the first time you have experienced it, you must be very unusual. The dream frequently also includes forgetting your locker combination and/or the geography of the school. Having been a teacher, I get the added experience of being a teacher in the nightmare and having no idea where (or sometimes even what) my next class is. In the student version, I'm always amazed that I've been carrying the textbook around in my backpack for months and have never opened it. This is especially curious since I never had a backpack when I was a student!
They had not been invented yet when I was in school. We carried them stacked in our arms.
Backpacks certainly existed when I was in school in the '50s and '60s, but they were confined to military or hiking use. I may have had book bags or satchels, I think. I don't remember ever seeing anyone use a book strap, though; that was before my time. In grade school, I think books didn't go home much; I don't remember a lot of homework. In junior high and high school, books stayed in our lockers except for specific classes, and it would have been rare for all the books to have gone home at once (yet surely we had homework in every subject every night?). Since we ordinarily had only four academic subjects at a time, though, I guess that would have been a maximum of four books.
Yes, backpacks were for military and hikers. We had lockers, but my high school consisted of a large campus with several buildings and it was not always convenient to get to our lockers. It was a public high school, but unusual for its large campus.