My Education Read Online Free PDF

of speed grading, for which you will ever be grateful to me.”
    â€œThis sounds suspiciously like a work-study job, but I’ve already got one. And there’s a rule against holding two.”
    â€œWhat is it, coediting
Tempus Fugit
?” This was the literature quarterly the university published, and with which it occupied all first-year English students. In the forthcoming Winter issue I would appear on the masthead, for which honor, not to mention the stipend I lived on, I was supposed to sit in the
Tempus
office at least six hours a week. “I can reassign you easily,” he was saying. “You will not lose your stipend, and you’ll be spared the corrosive effects of an editing job on your mind.”
    â€œIt’s not really an editing job—”
    â€œI hope you’ll never waste your energy buffing up someone else’s poor writing,” he interrupted me again, and again I caught a glimpse of the imperiousness that was the flip side of his apparent humility, and to which I admittedly thrilled. “It doesn’t only take time from your own work, it hurts your work actively. It infects it with a viral mediocrity. Much better that you should spend your spare time reading Chaucer. You’ll still have the students’ mediocre papers to guard yourself from, but they’ll prey on a less crucial bit of your brain.”
    â€œI don’t know a thing about Chaucer,” I reiterated as a final, if pro forma, protest, though from beneath my damp sundress, my heart telegraphed its excitement. He knew I knew nothing, and still wanted me. By the end I’d know
something
—I vowed it.
    â€œYou need only read him.” He had gone into a drawer of his desk and for a moment I caught sight of mashed haystacks of paper, like the inside of his Danish schoolbag, before the drawer was shoved shut. He passed a few stapled pages to me, his Chaucer syllabus. “You see I’m presuming consent. Reassure me.” He waited so seriously for my answer I felt a finger of pleasure slide down my midline, and so was conscious of seeming as chaste as I could when I spoke.
    â€œI’d love to. Thank you. But I’m nervous. I’ll be out of my depth in a whole different way.”
    â€œI promise you won’t. And as I said, you’ll be doing me the greater favor. Since Sasha bowed out it’s only been myself and my superlative student Laurence Pumbleton—do you know him?—and Laurence has a baby at home, and soon I will as well.”
    The penny had dropped. The woman who’d passed by his doorway and tossed the grenade of her gaze at his face—this was his wife, prospective mother of his child. I tried to hide my flusterment by laughing, with too much energy. “You might find me better suited to babysitting than teaching Chaucer,” I said. “When is your baby due? And I should say congratulations.”
    â€œYou’re very kind. My firstborn is due in mere moments it seems. Meanwhile Chaucer: the lectures are Thursdays at three. Read this week’s tale first and then start from the top and catch up with as much as you can. I’ll have Laurence tell you the rest as he understands all of it better than me.”
    â€œI’m sure that’s not true.”
    â€œOh, it’s true, and it will be true of you before long.”
    There was physical comedy as we ended our meeting. He came out from behind the monumental desk, and I rose from the chair, and then we were left sharing the little square of floor space in front of the door so that contact seemed called for and yet none was appropriate. It would have made no more sense to shake hands than to kiss. And so we hovered a moment too close to each other before I was able to sidle myself just athwart the threshold. Then with one of my feet planted in the hallway I think we both felt a danger had passed, in the same way that, with my dizzying transformation in minutes