“Ok, class, did you all do your reading last night?”

“Yes, yes,” they said.

I looked around the room.

“Show of hands, who did the homework?”

A surge of hands like waving wheat as the wind swept across the plain, but in the corner, always in the corner, Robert wasn’t sure, tried, raised his hand part way, lowered it back down.

“Robert, do you have something to tell us?”

“Yes and no.”

“Give us both.”

“Yes, because I tried. No, because I didn’t finish.”

“And why not?”

“Because I’m terminally lazy.”

The class laughed. They all know Robert.

“So, class, what should we do about this miscreant in his dereliction of duty?”

“Make him pay! Make him sweat! Exact retribution!”

“Well, Robert, you heard the class. What do you have to say? What can you give us to assuage our hunger for verifiable righteousness?”

“I can promise to make up last night’s assignment, and do tonight’s faithfully so I’ll be caught up with the class.”

“Class, do we believe him?”

“No!” the class thundered. “We know him too well. He’s a weasel and he’ll try to weasel out of it by twisting words like a lawyer.”

“Robert? What do you have to say?”

“I swear by all that’s holy.”

“Class, do we accept that?”

“No. It assumes that there is something holy, and holy to him, that he is so motivated by honesty that he would never not tell the truth. We are too far along in this century and have seen the loss of certainty. We have seen people lie under oath, left hand on the Bible, right hand raised to swear, putting on the show so we can pretend to believe them as they “swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” all the while lying like a rug.

“Precedent destroys certainty. We all remember the re-play of videos from last century, which you, dear teacher, witnessed in contemporaneous person, the former President, to avoid prison, resigned, saying from the safe vantage of the steps up to the get-away plane, “I am not a crook…I still believe I did nothing wrong, but events and evidence to the contrary seem to indicate otherwise…”

“Robert?”

“I’m as good as my word.”

“We don’t know you well enough to know how good that is.”

“Test me tomorrow. I won’t try to get out of it by calling in sick, taking refuge in absence.”

“Oh, we’ll test you!” said the class.

I intervened, “Cliche, cliche. For now we can ‘let sleeping dogs lie,’ ‘take him at his word,’ ‘the proof is in the pudding,’ we won’t ‘throw out the baby with the bath…’

“Moving right along, as we always do to fill the precious time we have together, tomorrow we’ll catch up on Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, but for now, we turn to that very famous poem by Dylan Thomas, I’ll tell you more about him later, I almost met him, but for now we’ll consider “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

“I’m going to play the scene from the movie, “Back to School,” where Rodney Dangerfield displays his surprising ability to act with depth as he narrates the poem, on a level with serious actors who intone for a living, matching them, surpassing some, showing us to our unexpected delight that he’s not just the bug-eyed comic of one-liners…”

After class, I said, “Robert, stay.”

He stood patiently by my desk.

I suppressed the joy I always feel of teaching in a class which matches me and sometimes surpasses me.

I said, “Tomorrow.”

He answered, “Tomorrow.”