A few years ago, when I had just started my job at Penn, my father and I had a conversation about the special kind of exhaustion that comes from teaching. Nothing I had ever done before--not competitive sports, not pulling all-nighters, not taking my qualifying exams, not finishing my dissertation--had wiped me out as completely as a typical week of teaching. It was mysterious. After all, teaching a 2/2 load was hardly heavy lifting compared to what other folks do. It was disturbing. Was I getting old? Was I getting sick? And it was overwhelming. After my last class of the week, I would stagger home, collapse on the sofa, and become comatose. It was too much trouble to stagger to the kitchen to make dinner, too much trouble to peel my lenses off my eyes. Thursday nights became semi-conscious monuments to the effort I had somewhere, somehow expended during the week. Drifting in and out of quasi-awareness, I would deliriously relive, and revise, the week's classes while the themes from Friends, Seinfeld, and E.R. played endlessly in the background. I asked my Dad about it, and he said that the reason teaching is so tiring is that it involves suppressing so much anger. I was unsure what he meant by that, but I figured that as a veteran of more than two decades of teaching at Indiana University's medical school he probably knew what he was talking about. God knows he's won enough teaching awards.

So I started watching for signs of anger, and for signs of repression, and I started to see what he meant. Good teaching is by definition an exercise in constructive frustration--you are always trying to take your students just a little bit further than they want, or can, go. You are always aware of the line between where your students are comfortable (which by definition is where even the very best, most motivated students want to stay) and where they begin to squirm (which is where they do not want to be, but where you have to send them, if you are going to do your job). The work of teaching is the work of keeping your students just far enough out of their comfort zone that they learn, but not so far that they get lost, or get angry, or give up. You are always aware of pushing your students, and always aware that many of them don't appreciate being pushed. And so you are always a little on edge, even in the best of times, because doing your best, and doing your job, always involves upsetting at least some of your students all of the time. Add to this that this work never really advances--as soon as you begin to get somewhere with one group, the semester is over, and you have to start all over again, from scratch. Teaching is not just an exercise in constructive frustration--it is also an exercise in tolerating repetition. You generate a lot of excess emotion along the way, if you care about what you are doing. And because there is no place for that emotion to go, you wear yourself out keeping it down and in. In short: teaching is tiring because it involves such tremendous acts of repression (of anger, yes, and also frustration, and hope, and annoyance, and faith, and--it must be said--outrage that none of your own teachers ever bothered to mention it would be this way). The good teachers make it look easy. But it ain't.

I mention the place of anger in teaching, and the incredible emotional toll teaching takes, as a way of prefacing a few remarks on a lawsuit that has recently been filed by a first-year law student at the University of Virginia against Kenneth Abraham, an award-winning, highly respected law professor who made the mistake of tapping her shoulder last fall during a torts class. Abrahams was illustrating the legal principle known as the "eggshell skull rule" as part of a lesson on Vosburg v. Putney, a case in which one child kicked another lightly in the shin, the shin was damaged far beyond what one would expect for a mild kick, and the kicker was held liable for all damages. Abraham teaches torts every year, and every year he teaches Vosburg v. Putney. Every year, as part of the lesson, he taps a randomly chosen student on the shoulder to demonstrate the sort of slight contact that can, in some cases, be actionable. Last fall, he tapped Marta Sanchez on the shoulder. And lo -- that tap has indeed become a cause of action. Last February, Sanchez filed a civil complaint in a circuit court against Abraham alleging that the tap was actually a "caress," that it put her in "reasonable fear of injury," that it brought back memories of being sexually abused while a child in Panama, that it caused her emotional suffering, migraine headaches, and upset stomach, and that Abraham should have to pay for touching off her repressed fear of men with authority. She wants $25,000 in compensatory damages, and $10,000 in punitive damages, and says "It was basically killing me not to do anything [about the touch]. I was feeling worse and worse, because I knew I was wronged. To expect I wouldn't be bothered by this is to expect Holyfield not to be bothered by Tyson biting his ear."

Who is this woman? And why in the world are people listening to her? How far are we going to let the wounded woman act go before we stop allowing professional victims to destroy our working and learning environments? Sanchez has had a hellish life, if what she says about her childhood is true (an awful lot of "repressed memories" aren't after all). But Abraham is hardly responsible for Sanchez's past experiences of victimization, he is not himself a victimizer, and, to use a fun legal term, I don't see how being a rape victim under the Noriega regime is "admissible" here, especially since Sanchez seems far more interested in turning the episode into a moneymaking opportunity than into a chance to confront her apparently extensive emotional problems. If the issue were really one of coping with past pain, Sanchez's focus would not be on Abraham, but on herself. She would not be seeking to punish him by humiliating him publicly and taking him for a financial ride. She would not be trying to cast him as a violent predator by comparing him to the emotionally-challenged Mike Tyson. And she would not be in the business of chilling academic freedom for all teachers--something behavior like hers inevitably does. But then, maybe for Sanchez money really does buy happiness.

Another reason why teaching is so exhausting, one that is implicit in the reasons I rehearsed above, but that ought to be clearly spelled out: in today's more-sensitive-than-thou campus climate, students have their teachers in a moral vise. One false move--as defined by one student's skewed and self-serving perspective--and you are wrecked and ruined, your reputation trashed, your savings drained, your ability to do your job with energy, clarity, creativity, confidence, and commitment permanently compromised. Who can teach under such conditions? Who would want to? More to the point, in an America desperately in need of more and better teachers, who will?