In Rasselas, Samuel Johnson’s philosopher Imlac offers the following bleak assessment of life: “Human life is every where [sic] a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed” ([1759] 1999, 31). Having been a teacher for more than 30 years, I desperately hope the same is not true of education. Still, education does come with challenges. In the latter half of the semester last fall, for instance, I was having one of my weekly meetings with my most recent student peer teacher, who assisted me that semester in conducting a section of one of the two interdisciplinary humanities seminars I regularly teach, Intellectual Heritage I: The Good Life. Somehow, our conversation on the day in question veered toward what we dubbed students’ “late-semester blues,” a sort of melancholy that college students may experience owing to the workload of a long three months or more, especially as final exams, final papers, and final projects loom. We chatted briefly about this particular form of malaise, but then our conversation returned to the more immediate topic of my student peer teacher’s lesson planning: she was excitedly preparing to teach one of her favorite Edgar Allan Poe poems, “The Conqueror Worm,” in an upcoming class.
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