The Adjunct

A borderline student, who is likely not going to pass my class, has requested a conference with me. These never go well. The student never wants to discuss their writing; they just want to inform me that they do not understand why they aren’t passing the class. I usually take about fifteen minutes to explain all the things their writing is lacking, all the mistakes they are repeatedly making, but they just fold their arms and tell me that they have no idea what my problem is.

I hate these things!

What annoys me most is that a student will ask questions that they should have asked weeks, even months ago. I’ve had students ask me to explain major assignments the day before they are due (MAJOR assignments, worth 20% of their grade, and for which they had months to work on). I find myself repeating my lectures during one-on-one conferences. The students don’t listen, and they don’t ask questions until they are failing. They are often surprised attendance alone is not enough for a B.

Brainstorm! Oh, I just had a brainstorm!

From now on, whenever a student comes up to me after class and asks a question they should have asked in class…I won’t answer it. I’ll say, “You should have asked that in class. Ask me that first thing when next we meet.”

No more private lessons.

Just noticed this sad story on the Salon Wires, from The Sun:

Mar 6th, 2009 | YUMA, Ariz. — “No money — please donate supplies.” That’s the desperate plea an elementary school in Yuma (YOO’-ma), Ariz., has posted on its marquee.

Carver Elementary School Principal Debra Drysdale says the message is no joke — and it’s working. She estimates that the school has received $500 to $700 in donations from community members, parents and people who just happened to be driving by.

The principal says the funds the school uses to buy office supplies and replace equipment and furniture have been depleted. She says teachers are buying supplies for their classrooms and saving money by shutting off lights and returning district-supplied cell phones.

I’m sure everyone by now has noticed my own sad little beggar’s cup…

I realized something about the life of a teacher last night.

It takes only a little to make it great, and it takes a lot to make it bad.

When I began teaching, I always wore very casual clothing.  I had a desire to be viewed by my students as “one of them.”  At the time, I was 23 years old, and very close in age to most of my students.  I wanted to be known as a teacher who was hip and cool and, above all else, young.  So I wore a t-shirt and jeans to class, or sometimes polo and khaki shorts, and I asked everyone to call me by my first name.  I also didn’t take roll, and sat cross-legged on my desk.

We learn through trail and error.

No one came to class.  Why should they? I had no attendance policy.  I explained to them that they were all adults, and they were all at college by choice, and for their own personal betterment, so just come as much as they felt they needed to do well on the essays and exams.  And no one ever showed up.  And they all failed.  And they all complained about their fails.  And now I have a strict attendance policy.

As the years passed, fewer and fewer students commented on how young I looked.  Last year, a student guessed that I was 40, and I nearly had a one-third-life-crisis.  The next day, a student asked me in front of the entire class if this was my first time teaching, and I didn’t get an overwhelming feeling that she asked me this because I looked so darn young.  I decided that dressing down and looking cool, casual, and hip was no longer what I wanted; fear and respect was where it’s at!  Ever since, I’ve worn a suit and tie to work everyday.  While my students are less inclined to pull up a chair and “rap” with me, they sure as shine don’t pull half the crap they used to.

I still sit on my desk, from time to time.

Baby ‘customizing’ advances claimed:

NEW YORK, March 3 (UPI) — A U.S. fertility doctor says that he will soon be able to allow parents to choose their babies’ eye and hair color.

Dr. Jeff Steinberg, whose Fertility Institute has clinics in New York and Los Angeles, says research that has already made it possible to select a baby’s gender has also yielded the technology to enable parents to make eye and hair color choices, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday.

“In the process of doing gender selection … we’ve also uncovered the technology (to) characterize things like eye and hair color,” Steinberg, 54, told the newspaper.

Do we have to limit our choices to the color combinations available between my wife and I, or can we start sticking in genes for any option available from the whole human gene pool? 

If so, I’d like my baby to have purple eyes, skin that’s Obama-brown, and colorless, translucent white hair. Oh, and while we’re at it, make it twins! I shall name them The Sisters of Prognostication, Apathy and Decay, and they shall walk the land for twenty winters, spreading word of the New Order!

Seriously, did no one see Gattaca? This can only end badly: people with low life expectancy will impersonate British Olympic swimmers in order to become astronauts and travel to the sixth moon of Saturn.

“I’m sorry, but only tenured faculty may have textbooks. Adjuncts will just have to make do without them.”

Imagine if the above was true. It is absurd to think that just because an instructor does not have tenure they should not be given something as essential as textbooks. Yet, part-time instructors are often denied an equally vital resource: an office.

I don’t have an office. I work at three different districts, but not one of them is willing to provide me a space, shared or otherwise, in which I can meet with students, grade papers, . Despite this, each and every one of those three districts requires me to keep office hours. How I am expected to do this when I have no office in which to hold these office hours is beyond me. When students ask where my office is, I simply point to a nearby bench.

Why is an office such a rare commodity? The classic line from those who sit above us is that there simply is not enough office space to go around. The fact that I often find 2-3 tenured faculty sharing a tiny office would seem to collaborate this. Yet just the other day, during a department meeting, when the issue of finding some office space for adjuncts was raised, our chair raised his hands in frustration and revealed that an entire floor of our massive administration building was completely vacant; on this floor were offices, most already with desks and other furniture, enough to provide every adjunct professor on campus with his or her own space, provided they were willing to share. Why was this floor vacant? No idea, but it turns out that it has been empty for years now. When would we be allowed to claim some of this unused space? “Don’t hold your breath,” was our chair’s pessimistic reply. “Moving on, we’ve run out of money for paper.”

There’s another reason that I don’t buy the old “not enough space on campus” song and dance. I don’t want to start an academic class war here, but every time I do pass through upper echelons of our administration building, at every campus, I see door after door of spacious offices. These offices are huge, with clean carpeting, and plush couches which face giant oak desks. Whose offices are these? Why, they belong to the Vice Chancellor of Planning, or the Dean of Student Affairs, or the Dean of Student Development (different from the Dean of Student Affairs), or maybe even Vice President of Instruction. These mighty people all have their own enormous office. These gods among men do not need to share. In fact, as I stroll through the hallways, peeking inside to see how the other half lives, I often find these people not only have their own private offices of luxury, but they have personal secretaries who have their own little office as well. Meanwhile, I have a bench, and tenured faculty are packed like sardines inside of offices the size of my bedroom.

So I don’t buy it.

The first thing that we must accomplish is to prove that having an office is as vital a teaching resource as textbooks and chalk. On this note, I would say that college professors need to be available to meet with students to go over their grades, help students with key concepts or lessons that they might not be fully grasping, and just generally be available to answer students questions and address student concerns. This is not something that can be accomplished ten minutes before class. Students have the right to meet with their teacher privately, and one-on-one. Denying a college professor an office thus denies all of their students this right. On the teacher side of things, having a place on campus where you sit down and grade papers is essential to performing the full job. What do I mean by the full job? Well, the work doesn’t end when class does. Teachers have a ridiculous and intensive amount of work that they must do outside of the classroom: preparing lectures, writing lesson plans, and grading student papers. We need a place besides our homes to be able to do this part of our job. These requirements don’t go away if you are an adjunct.

Once we’ve established that having a desk, even a desk you share with 2-3 other people, is a necessary part of being a teacher, then we need to demand equal allocation of this resource. I don’t just mean equal allocation between tenure and adjunct, but equality of office allocation for both administration and instruction. I see no reason why the Vice Chancellor of Blippity Bloop needs a giant, CEO-like office, while it can be justified that 2-3 tenured professors can just share a tiny office. We need to demand equal accommodations, and if there isn’t enough space to give everyone these Vice President-sized offices of space and luxury, then I am afraid that the higher ups and going to need to learn how to share.

Not to compare apples to oranges, but the Screen Actor’s Guild has a great rule: on the set of a film or television show, everyone eats what the director and movie star eats. They decided that Tom Hanks gets lobster for lunch, then so do the extras; everyone eats the same. We need a similar rule for resources such as offices.