A student, brimming with the kind of arrogance only a twenty-one-year-old can muster, stood in my office and declared my forty-two years of experience—my entire career—outdated and irrelevant.
He called my life’s work a system to be gamed, a joke to be hacked on his way to a future that he believed was already guaranteed.
Each class was met with a smirk, each assignment with the profound boredom of a man who believed he already had all the answers. My warnings were just inconvenient obstacles; my authority was a quaint suggestion.
He was so certain his future was already written, he never thought to check the footnotes. He should have, because the one that would academically obliterate him was a name I knew intimately from my own past, and I was about to use it to write his final chapter.
The Shadow in the Seminar Room: A Smirk in the Sonnets
The fluorescent lights of Room 312 in the English building hummed a weary, off-key tune. It was the same hum that had been the soundtrack to my life for forty-two years. Forty-two years of dusty chalk, the scent of old paper, and the bright, fleeting faces of students. Now, at sixty-four, with retirement a single semester away, the hum felt less like a soundtrack and more like a countdown.
“So, when Shakespeare writes, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,’” I began, scanning the seminar table, “he isn’t actually insulting his lover. He’s satirizing the very poets who make those impossible comparisons. He’s grounding love in reality.”
Most of the students nodded, their pens scratching dutifully. A few looked genuinely engaged, their eyes lit with the small fire of understanding that I lived for. And then there was Kevin.
He sat at the far end of the table, leaning back in his chair with a posture of profound boredom. Kevin was a political science star, the kind of student who appears on university brochures. He was sharp-jawed, wore tailored shirts, and had a look of perpetual, calculating assessment. This poetry class was a final, inconvenient checkbox on his path to a prestigious law school.
A smirk played on his lips. It wasn’t an aggressive expression, but something far more irritating: dismissal. It was the look of a man listening to a child explain the rules to a game he had already mastered.
“But isn’t that a bit… simplistic?” he asked. The question hung in the air, weighted with condescension. “You could argue the sonnet is actually a political text. Shakespeare is deconstructing the established power structures of Petrarchan idealism, using the mistress as a symbol for the unadorned, chaotic proletariat, while the sun represents the gilded, untouchable monarchy.”
The room fell silent. My other students looked at him, then at me, their faces blank. They didn’t understand his jargon, but they understood his tone. He wasn’t offering an interpretation; he was issuing a correction.
I kept my voice even. “That’s certainly an interesting lens, Kevin. But to get there, you have to ignore the poem’s language, its meter, its emotional core. It’s a love poem first.”
The smirk widened. “With all due respect, Dr. Reed, everything is a political text.”
He said ‘Dr. Reed’ like he was addressing a waitress. I saw it then, the looming issue of the semester, sitting right there in a crisp blue shirt. He didn’t just think poetry was frivolous. He thought I was.
Coffee and Contempt
Two days later, I was waiting in line at The Daily Grind, the campus coffee shop that perpetually smelled of burnt espresso and student anxiety. I just wanted a simple black coffee, a quiet moment to look over my notes for my afternoon lecture. My husband, Mark, always told me I worked too hard, especially now, so close to the end. “You’ve earned the right to coast, Ev,” he’d said just this morning. But coasting wasn’t in my nature.
“I’m telling you, it’s a joke,” a familiar voice cut through the din. “Poetry for Political Players. You just find a power dynamic, slap some Foucault on it, and boom, instant A. The old lady eats it up.”
I froze, my hand hovering over the raw sugar packets. It was Kevin. He was two people ahead of me in line, holding court with a pair of friends who looked like younger versions of himself—all ambition and expensive haircuts.
“She seems to know her stuff, though,” one of them offered meekly.
Kevin let out a short, sharp laugh. “She knows about rhyme schemes. It’s cute. But it’s not relevant. It’s a dead art form propped up by a dead institution. I’m just hacking the system to get my humanities credit.”
My face grew hot. Old lady. It’s cute. The words were small, casual daggers. It wasn’t just the insult to my field, or even to me personally. It was the utter certainty of his position. The absolute conviction that his worldview—pragmatic, cynical, obsessed with power—was the only one that mattered. He saw my life’s work not as a rich tapestry of human expression, but as a system to be gamed.
I wanted to step forward, to say something sharp and clever that would put him in his place. But what would I say? I heard you. You’re a disrespectful prick. It would be messy, unprofessional. It would give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten under my skin.
Instead, I turned and walked out of the coffee shop, the bell on the door tinkling behind me like a tiny, mocking laugh. The caffeine headache was already starting to bloom behind my eyes.
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