One of my students constantly changes her name. I don’t find it particularly shocking. I’ve had students enter the classroom late through the window, instead of using the door. I’ve had students who choose to sit on the floor or at the foot of my lectern while I teach, not at their desks. I’ve had to break up violent fights, with desks and chairs flying across the room as if my lessons had released some kind of paranormal energy. I’ve faced classes made up only of girls, who split into gangs and screamed insults at one another for obscure reasons. I’ve dealt with epileptic fits, mystical crises, panic attacks, kids going through puberty, kids going through withdrawal. I’ve ignored students masturbating under their desks and students silently passing gas. At least once a month, I’ve had to pick girls up off the floor after they’d fainted from the tempest of hormones going on inside them. I’ve been humiliated countless times by 16-year-old boys who wanted to arm-wrestle me just to prove how much stronger they were. I’ve had to put up with students plonking away on guitars while I taught Tasso’s The Liberation of Jerusalem. Why should I get upset if a student goes by one name one day and a different name the next?

I’ve made a list of her creative monikers: Over the past week alone, she has gone by Gioia Del Colle (the name of a town in Puglia), Sibilla Salute (a play on the name of a popular contraceptive pill), Grazia Deis (a riff on the Latin phrase Dei gratia), Melissa Godano, Serena Sventura, Michela Stobene, Dolores Indolore. They’re sonorous but off-kilter names, each charged with either desire or distress, and all far more evocative than her real name, which is Ornella Zanni. She never simply tells me her chosen alias; clearly, she’d rather remain anonymous. No, I have to beg and plead with her to divulge it to me; I have to ask her friends and whine; I grow despondent and say she doesn’t love me anymore. And when somehow I manage to pry her nom du jour out of her (“Dolores Indolore!”), I go around proclaiming it joyfully to all the other teachers (“Today Zanni’s name is Dolores Indolore!”), I tell the custodians, and I repeat roll call all the way to “Indolore, Dolores,” expecting her to say, “Here.” And if she appears a bit embarrassed by it all, I turn to the class and ask, “What’s wrong with inventing a name for yourself that reflects your state of mind or how you feel?” And then I conclude by praising her: “Well done, Dolores. Keep it up.”

I’ve been running my class this way, benevolently, for years. I’ve become convinced that knowledge is nothing more than a catalogue raisonné of the gratuitous horrors of the world.