Sedaris’s unconventional teaching style catches up with him when a student complains about his strange pedagogical practices. Instead of letting this scare him into running a traditional class, though, he merely adds a writing assignment to the periodic viewings of soap operas like
One Life to Live. In doing so, though, he realizes that his students aren’t taking the class seriously, and the fact that this makes him so angry suggests that he truly believed in the value of his lessons about soap operas. In turn, readers get the sense that, though Sedaris resorted to watching television in class because he didn’t know what else to do, he has more or less managed to convince himself that this is a sound approach to teaching writing. In a certain way, then, he has come to see himself as a legitimate instructor.