Right before the beginning of this semester, I had a vivid dream that I walked into class unprepared for the first day–the classic reversal of being called on while unprepared; I was unprepared as the Prof! Well, it turned out the dream wasn’t too far from reality.

The other night I had a somewhat related classroom dream. For some reason, even though I was a Professor, I was sitting in a student’s seat in the class of one of my colleagues. I wasn’t sure why. And, for whatever reason, a student’s laptop was at my seat. It started making noise, and I couldn’t mute it (I was hitting the volume down all the way but it kept making noise). The Professor started yelling at me, and didn’t realize that I was also a Professor. I stood up and said something like, Hi, I’m Josh Blackman a Professor here.  She said something like, “I don’t care who you are and asked me to leave the classroom.” It was really embarrassing.

I’ll think that one through.

This happens surprisingly often–some staff and faculty still mistake me for a student. I was recently at the Federalist Society Student Symposium, and everyone assumed I was still a student. After a while I began trolling them and played along, and didn’t make clear I was a Prof. I wanted to see how far I could make it into the convo before I had to reveal that I was a prof and not a student. I could usually get past “I’m at South Texas College of Law” and “it’s my first year” (didn’t specify teaching or learning).