One by one the students presented themselves, some of them shy to the point of giddiness, others too snooty to be really at ease, a few whose names I’d ordinarily have remembered because they were the ones who would become the basis, the foundation of my courses, on whose account I’d remind myself I was working when I got ­discouraged at the others’ lack of interest—these were more laid-back, they’d look me straight in the eye, sometimes even give me a smile to let me know my subject doesn’t ­disgust them too much, even though it’s required. I ­counted three of them, two girls and a boy, one more than last year. But last year was especially depressing: granted they didn’t have to be talked into taking my courses, but they didn’t work too hard either, French being for most CEGEP students a superfluous subject, a ridiculously ­complicated mechanism it was considered cool to mock and to ignore, and that class in particular had been totally impervious to the beauties of the imperfect subjunctive and to the subtle differences between litotes and euphemism. That same class, though they did brilliantly in other subjects, had put up more resistance, so much that it finally became a point of honour for me to win them over, no matter what, and in fact this had drained a fair amount of my energy and time, and almost claimed my health too. By the end of the year I had them all in the palm of my hand, but I didn’t have much time to take advantage of it. I knew I was going to lose them and I’d have to start all over, which got me down.

I delivered my usual little speech. Zero. I didn’t even feel the boredom that comes over me when a class is going badly because I’m not up for it, or when I sense that the ­students are irretrievably lost. I even felt a little tremor of disgust as I skimmed over what I was going to try to instill in them by Christmas. I hoped it didn’t show, but I know that I glanced in panic towards the door once or twice. If they noticed they didn’t let on, and must have waited until after the class to talk among themselves about how the French prof who’d seemed like such a nice guy was ­actually as big a turkey as the rest of them.