Harangue

harangue
verb, transitive. To lecture (someone) at length in an aggressive and critical manner
noun. A lengthy and aggressive speech

He fetched a profound sigh as he finished reading the poem, and set the book aside as he raised the paper cup to his lips and sipped. Wordsworth and fine coffee in the early morning. In the park. What more could a young professor want? The weather was perfect, there was no one about to interrupt him, and later this morning he would take charge of his first class of upperclassmen. Graduate school was behind him, his dissertation had been published, and he had already made respectable progress on a new book--a critical work on Cowper.

He sipped again and nodded. This was his time to blossom into the kind of teacher he had always aspired to be: one who would awaken a passion for poetry and literature in his students equal to his own, not one who got bogged down in haranguing them about missed concepts and late assignments. He cringed when he remembered the freshman class he had taught last year. What a pack of laggards! If there had been one bright mind in that bunch, he could have done so much better, but every one of them thought of nothing but eking out an average grade--no better--so he or she could move on to the classes that would ensure a high salary after graduation. Culture? Who needed it? Fine language arts? Useless.

As the old, familiar feelings of panic and desolation stabbed him, he drew the battered volume near his face again, set the cup down, and thumbed the stained edges of the pages. He had to regain that euphoric feeling of anticipation he had experienced only a few minutes ago. He had to incorporate it into his being before he faced his class, or this would be another lost year--he knew it.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.