They come to class, most of them. Turning up on time, or late, then queuing after the end of teaching to get their names ticked off the roll.  There’s work in turning up and they need it to count, which is why the weeks before the start of semester are hectic, with everyone jockeying for the best timetable they can get.

Then it’s mid-semester. Once again the girl who sits with the girl with the straightened hair—the girl whose phablet is always in or near her hand—has not brought her book of essential readings to class. We have this routine. I lift my eyebrows, and say, ‘So you haven’t got your reader?’ ‘Do I need it?’ she asks, and I walk to the next table, laughing.

One afternoon I’m playing the video lecture pods quietly in the background and the girl who never brings her Reader points at the woman on-screen and says, ‘Who’s that?’  I resist looking around the room: there were fewer laughs at the ‘Who’s that?’ than I’d have expected, which means she’s not the only one who doesn’t recognise the other person lecturing in the course for the last six weeks. They’ll probably write anxious emails to me the night the next assessment is due, saying: ‘I don’t understand the instructions. Tell me what I have to do’. I did tell them what they had to do, at the time—when we were doing that week’s stuff. They sat at their round tables, staring at me as I stepped them through what their portfolio was, and what they have to do, what we expect to see. They were right there when I took them through it. Conversation analysis maybe, or semiotic analysis: Charles Sanders Pierce, he of the long beard and the overblown typology of signs: 60,000 separate elements. But the course makes it simple, going over Peirce’s trichotomy of signs: index, symbol, icon. Three is ok. Three is good. The Holy Trinity of Signs. And when the assessment comes in, I find I’m marking one about Peirce’s tracheotomy. The third time they call it that I write in the margins: ‘Did he do it with the casing of a ball point pen?’, realising as I write that this is what being defeated means, and this is what I’ve sunk to.

Recently, one of my colleagues told me what happened when he was teaching his First Years about metaphor. You should know about this man that he’s a great teacher, he is  clear and engaging whatever he’s teaching—whether it’s Judy Garland and the musical, or the behaviour of the gerund. So, that week he’s teaching metaphor. Loving a good show tune, he plays them Barbara Streisand’s ‘Evergreen’ then asks them to unpack the song’s use of metaphor. But there is no-one in the class who knows that there’s a type of tree called ‘evergreen’—no key, then, to unpack anything.

This is the problem of teaching now. Not what to teach, nor even how to teach: it’s the challenge of teaching when there is nothing to teach to; nothing to hang the ideas off, no language to build on. Not even stories commonly shared. I tend to use the  story of The Titanic in class alot—as analogy,  example or signifying event—as nearly all of my students know what it was, and that it sank. It’s my favourite teaching analogy: that unsinkable ship, that wreck.

It used to be that before the start of a semester I’d have teaching nightmares: that I am late to class, that the tutorial room is in a building in another campus, that the tutorial room is in mid-air, above my head, with no way up to it. Those dreams come more frequently now. In my most recent, I am running to class but get caught in a crowd of people moving in another direction, and when finally they disperse I find I’m on a ferry, and there’s a widening expanse of sea between me and the building in which I teach.