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a twenty-one-year-old can muster, stood in my office and declared my forty-two years of experience—my entire career—outdated and irrelevant.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.
Theories and Footnotes
The first papers came in the following week. The assignment was a straightforward explication of John Donne’s “The Flea.” I’d asked for a close reading, an analysis of how the poem’s shocking central metaphor—a flea that has bitten both lovers—is used to build a clever, if morally dubious, argument for seduction.
Most of the papers were fine. Some were good. One, by a quiet history major named Sarah, was exceptional, drawing a beautiful line between the poem’s theological language and its carnal intent. Then I opened Kevin’s.
The title alone made me sigh: “Parasitic Ideology: The Flea as a Metonym for Capitalist Exploitation in Post-Reformation England.”
The paper was dense, almost unreadable in its use of academic jargon. He didn’t mention love or seduction once. Instead, he wrote about dialectical materialism, socioeconomic hierarchies, and the commodification of the body. He cited Marx, Adorno, and a handful of contemporary political theorists. It was, on a technical level, an impressive piece of writing. The sentences were muscular, the argument intricate. It was also completely and utterly wrong.
He hadn’t engaged with the poem. He had strip-mined it for evidence to support a preconceived thesis, ignoring every nuance, every bit of wordplay, every ounce of humanity that made it a masterpiece. It was an act of intellectual vandalism.
I spent an hour crafting my feedback. I was careful, professional. “Kevin,” I wrote in the comments, “this is a powerfully argued and well-researched paper. However, it does not fulfill the assignment’s requirements. The goal was a close reading of the poem’s own language and themes, not the application of an external theoretical framework. By focusing exclusively on politics, you have missed the poem’s central conceit. Please see me if you’d like to discuss this further. C+.”
I handed the papers back at the end of class. Students flipped to the last page, their faces registering relief, disappointment, or satisfaction. When Kevin got his, he didn’t even flinch. He glanced at the grade, saw my comment, and I watched as a subtle, almost imperceptible eye-roll passed over his features before he tucked the paper into a sleek leather portfolio and walked out. He didn’t want to discuss it. Of course he didn’t. The C+ wasn’t a grade; it was an annoyance, a gnat to be swatted away.
A Conversation with a Ghost
“He basically called me an irrelevant old lady,” I said, swirling the wine in my glass. The ruby liquid caught the light of the setting sun streaming into our kitchen.
Mark, my husband of forty years, leaned against the counter, his smile gentle. He’d been a history teacher, so he knew the particular frustrations of the profession. “He didn’t basically call you that, Ev. From what you said, he literally called you that.”
“It’s not just that he’s arrogant,” I continued, a familiar frustration tightening my chest. “It’s that he’s not even curious. He’s decided my entire field is worthless. Four thousand years of human beings trying to make sense of their lives with words, and he’s dismissed it all by age twenty-one.”
“He’s a kid, honey. A pompous, overconfident kid who thinks he’s the first person to ever have a big thought. We had dozens of them over the years.”
“This feels different.” I took a sip of wine. “It feels… symptomatic. Like he’s the future and I’m the past. He thinks knowledge is just a weapon, something you use to win. He doesn’t see any value in beauty, or ambiguity, or just sitting with a difficult idea for the sake of it.”
Mark came over and put his arms around me. His hands were warm on my back. “He’s one student, in your last semester. Why are you letting him have so much space in your head?”
“Because he looks at me,” I said, the words coming out quieter than I intended, “and he doesn’t see a professor. He doesn’t see someone who has dedicated her life to this. He sees a ghost. A relic. And the worst part is, some small part of me is afraid he’s right.”
The Archive and the Arrogance: The Dust of Discovery
There was one part of the semester I guarded for myself, a little treasure I brought out near the end. It was the final paper. For this, I always chose an obscure poet, someone brilliant but forgotten, whose works weren’t anthologized or available in clean, modern editions. This year, it was Elara Vance. A fiercely intellectual, reclusive poet from the 1920s whose entire published collection consisted of two slim, self-printed volumes.
“Your final paper,” I announced to the class, “will be a ten-page analysis of the work of Elara Vance.”
A few blank looks. Perfect.
“You won’t find her on the internet,” I continued, a small thrill running through me. “Her books are long out of print. The only place to access her work, along with her letters and journals, is in the university’s Special Collections archive.”
A murmur went through the room. A few students groaned, but most looked intrigued. This was different. This wasn’t about Googling a summary; it was about touching history.
“This assignment is not just about the final product,” I explained, my voice filled with a genuine passion I couldn’t hide. “It’s about the process. It’s about the feeling of opening a box of letters that haven’t been read in fifty years. It’s about the smell of old paper, the hunt for a connection, the thrill of actual, tangible discovery. This is where scholarship comes alive.”
I looked around the room, my gaze landing on Kevin. He wasn’t groaning or looking intrigued. He was staring at me with a look of flat, undisguised disbelief, as if I had just announced the final paper would be written in invisible ink and submitted via carrier pigeon. He saw no thrill, only a pointless, inefficient obstacle.
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