With a number two pencil in my office cubicle I bubbled in the tiny circles on the official final grading roster, signed and dated it, and submitted the form to a clerk at the office of admissions and records. She checked my work for omissions and obvious mistakes and then stamped it received on that date.

All done.

The poem guy had performed less well than he had hoped and I had expected. He got a C. Despite his obvious disappointment he conducted himself like a gentleman, and for several weeks after the course was over he continued to visit my cubicle to show me recent poems of his invention and to seek my advice on a personal problem he said he could not solve on his own. He considered me a wise man, he told me far too seriously, and he said he knew no one else he respected enough to consult on this issue.

“I can’t stop smoking pot,” he confided. “I know I should. More than once I’ve tried—but I just can’t!”

Ten weeks later I received in the mail the results of the anonymous evaluations of my performance my students had earlier completed at the institution’s request. My numerical score was well below both the average of the college faculty as a whole and the average of all faculty in my department, lower by almost six tenths of a point on a five-point scale. I turned to the transcription of my students’ written comments. There was plenty of praise. But it was the negative I was most interested in. The most critical and most painful remarks I read and reread again and again. They are the conclusion to and the point of this story.

“Most of the material we covered and discussed was inappropriate.”

“All we did was talk about nonsense.”

“We discussed personal topics that had nothing to do with English.”

“He pushed his own point of view on us.”

“We spent more time on blabbing than on writing.”

“He asked us to explain stuff he himself had a hard time explaining.”

“We talked about death way too much.”

“I wish I’d chosen another teacher.”

“I didn’t learn a thing.”