The Adjunct

This arrived in the mail yesterday:

To: Instructors with Missing Grade Rosters
From: Division Dean
Date: January 11, 2010
Re: Missing Final Grade Rosters

Attached is a list of missing final grade rosters sent to me by Admissions and Records. Your name is on this list. Please follow the directions in the attached email from Admissions and Records staff to enter the final grades.

Per California Education Code, you must submit your grade rosters, in a timely fashion, at the end of each semester. They were due on January 4, 2010.

Sure enough, my name was on the list, conveiently highlighted by my Division Dean.

ENGL 267B – Professor STAFF

There’s only one problem: I did not have any students in English 267B. This college offers what are called AB courses, meaning a student can take them twice. The first time they take a course, they take A, in this case English 267A. If the student passed and wanted to take it again, they would enroll in English 267 B. I teach both A and B students in the same room, and thus get paid for teaching one course, English 267 AB.

So the reason that I have not submitted grade rosters for English 267 B is that I was never given a grade roster for 267 B, because I had 0 enrolled students in last semester (all the students were first timers taking English 267 A). Rosters are actually submitted online, and the computer does not even allow for me to select 267 B. After all, it has 0 enrolled students.

The fact that a class with 0 enrolled students would pass along so many desks of so many people, all of whom are supposed to be doing their job in some kind of supervisory or administrative fashion, yet not one of them would notice that the class has no students is very disheartening.

Instructors are losing their jobs left and right, and yet there is an army of handsomely paid, full-time, benefit receiving administrators and staff who seem to do little more than forward emails and create a lot of paperwork in order to justify their positions.

It is also disheartening that I, a lowly, underpaid, non-benefit receiving instructor immediately noticed that all but a few of the other names on this forwarded list have one thing in common: they are all instructors of B courses. Obviously, these other instructors had 0 enrolled students in the B section of their class. How could all the people at Admissions and Records, as well as the Division Dean, have completely missed this easily noticeable fact?

The answer: they never even looked into it. None of them questioned why all these teachers would be so negligent with their grade rosters. None of them contacted any of the instructors personally to speak to them about this issue. Not one of them even looked at the enrollment numbers for any of these classes. They just stamped out a form letter and sent it off to 25 college instructors.

So now I need to email about three people in regards to this. Why do I need to email three people, you ask? Well, past experience has taught me that an email to this particular Division Dean will likely result in a reply back that it is not her problem, and that I am the one who has to contact Admissions and Records about this error. Often, they never write back at all.

So off an email goes to the Division Dean, her secretary (sorry! sorry! Administrative Assistant), and this random administrator of Admissions and Records.

I know that we are already two weeks into January, but I’d still like to take a moment to affirm my resolutions for this new year.

Last year I made ten resolutions, and managed to accomplish about half of them (this website being one of them).  Not bad for someone who spent several months with a cast on his foot!

The biggest promise to myself this new year is to never again make the mistake of last July, when I committed myself to a six day a week intense workload.  This is another reason why not all of my former resolutions were met, let alone the lack of regular updates to this blog.  I found myself being offered more and more classes, and considering both the economy at large and the fact that my state was firing adjunct professors left and right, I accepted everything I could.  The paychecks were great, but my life was hell.  I never saw my wife, was tired and exhausted and cranky all the time, and at the end my health just shattered and I barely made it to the end of the semester.

Never again.

Worst of all was that I started to hate my job.  The quality of my work went downhill, something that did not make me happy about going in to class everyday.  Also, I began losing all my patience with my students as well as the rest of the college staff.  Doing something that you hate is not how I want to live my life.  I love teaching, and I need to not only keep my hours reasonable, but I need to remember that the recurring frustrations of the job are something to be laughed off and left behind; not taken with you the cost of your own personal joy.

So that’s one resolution, I suppose.  The rest are either new, or continued from last year.

Shall we go backwards?  Nah, these are in no particular order.

*Approach my job as a fulfilling and joyful part of my life.

*Get in shape; lose weight.

*Finish editing my novel.

*Write those two short stories that I’ve been dawdling on.

*Start new novel.

*Actively seek publication for my writing.

*Learn Spanish.  Yes, Spanish.  I was born and raised in Los Angeles and it is fucking shameful that I don’t speak this.

*Take fencing lessons.  Doesn’t that sound cool?*

*Get readers together for English 1A, 1B, 2, etc (I’ll make a post about this later, but I have a rather fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants style as far as reading materials and associated quizzes are concerned.  I grab articles out of yesterday’s newspapers, rotate short stories, etc.  A more solid collection for each class of reading assignments, and their related quizzes and writer’s journals, will ensure more organization and less prep time on my part).

*Buy a house and get some chickens for the backyard.  Yea, you heard me. Why do you think I took so much work last year?  I had something in mind to save for.