“The full-time, tenured professors feel comfortably separated from those whom they instruct. Their students, the ones who attend class during daylight hours, tend to be younger than mine. Professors can fail these young people with emotional impunity because many such failures are the students’ own fault.

But my students and I are of a piece. Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up. I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers.