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.