The Former Student
Part 1
The universe was conspiring against him Martin thought as he saw the email notification pop up on his phone. The name of the sender burned into his eyes, his brain unhelpfully adding the honorific that it had bestowed on her. Yes, he had been very unwise and weak to create the situation in which he found himself in but he hadn't known that he would ever see that name come back into his world.
Martin knew his weakness well, Japanese femdom... There was just something about watching cute, young Japanese women boss around and abuse men twice their size for fun. Watching the videos made his flesh crawl with the shared humiliation of the men on the screen and made his cock twitch. But it was just a harmless fetish that he knew he would never have the guts to act on in real life. Besides it was healthy for the prostate to masturbate frequently so it was his dirty secret that no one, except his internet provider and google of course, knew about.
Well it was a little dangerous given he taught university classes that often had multiple cute Japanese women in them. But he was very firm about it. He never thought about his students that way. No matter how cute they were, no matter how scanty the clothing the normal university student wore these days; there was a solid barrier between his real life and his fantasy life. This was really helped by the student, professor dynamic... he had the power of grades to hold over their heads and in response the deferential way they acted towards him was light years away from the way the woman he fantasised about treated him in his thoughts as he lay stroking his cock each night.
Reiko had been different. Brilliant but volatile. She had seemed bored with the course at times, forgetting to turn in assignments, missing quizzes but had aced every test she had bothered to write. One of those academic stars that was clearly destined for a bright future if she could figure out how to play within the system long enough to get there.
Reiko didn't seem to care about marks so there wasn't any deference paid to him as the instructor. She often seemed offended by the subjectivity of the course material, often demanding more proof or examples for lecture content. She seemed determined to find holes in the logic of each lecture, which there were lots... the course was being taught at the second year level so there was a fair amount of hand waving to paper over the gaps in the simple theories that were being presented.
Martin enjoyed the classroom participation of course. Nothing was more soul crushing than spending three hours expositing on economics to a room filled with hundreds of students and never hearing a peep in return. Any words spoken from students were precious gifts to be cherished and treated with great care in the hopes that it would spark even more students to raise their eyes from surfacing the internet on their laptops and actually take part in their education.
However, it was frustrating at times being forced to defend the shoddy logic of the course to an insightful student. Martin would love to be able to have an actual conversation with her in the classroom, explain to her clearly how the problems she had seen actually were problems and that was why this material was only taught in undergrad courses. These were meant to simply be the first steps in building up to much more complicated models in grad school that would reflect her stated concerns. But those models would require a lot more math and a general understanding of agent's optimisation for a student to have any hope of comprehending them. And this course didn't even have a prerequisite for calculus.
So he was stuck in front of the class, moving lines around on graphs and proclaiming fuzzy statements with lots of weasel words instead of writing out the math that would nail down exactly what would happen in the economy. While this cute Japanese woman attacked him over and over again with logic he couldn't refute. Because he knew that as soon as he actually gave ground and started talking about the exceptions to the models in response to her questions then that was the only thing a decent percentage of the class would remember on tests. He needed to give them simple truths for simple minds at this point in their undergraduate careers. Those that stuck with the field and displayed some ability would be told in the future that most of what he was saying was nonsense, but that they had needed to learn it in order to understand the much more complicated truth.
He could hardly use the 'lies to children' model of education to defend the lecture material so it made for some very rough moments when he was frantically searching for some way to refute a particularly insightful attack from the lovely Reiko. He could only use the dodge of 'the math is too complicated for me to get into at this level' so many times before it started to sound like he didn't know what he was talking about. 'I would be happy to discuss this after class but it doesn't fall within the course content' worked a bit but that led to long discussions with this spirited vixen in an empty classroom late at night ... Not a situation a professor wanted to be in, especially not with an erection beginning to form in their trousers.
He was sure she wasn't being intentionally rude, probably just being on the autistic spectrum somewhere and not being great about picking up social cues. But no amount of yawning, sorting his lecture papers and erasing the board would give her the hint that it was time to go home and stop pestering her poor professor. It had always been his policy to stay after class as long as there were students asking questions but there were limits... he needed sleep unlike these teenagers that just needed to blink their eyes a few times and be ready for another night of partying.