The Adjunct

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.

“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.

I’ve never been asked to explain the proper use of a semicolon, or how to fix a comma splice, but I teach grammar courses. I teach college level classes on rhetorical analysis, but never once during an interview have I been asked to define rhetoric, nor ethos, pathos, and logos. No one has ever asked to see my writing, and they have also never asked to see how I would mark and score another person’s writing. The biggest question has always been one of availability: “What days and times can you teach?” The next question is for me to explain my teaching philosophy: an abstract concept, full of superflous ideals, and zero demonstration of anything other than one’s bullshitting skills. I believe no student should be left behind. I prefer to be the guide on the side, rather than the sage on the stage. No, I never fantasize about beating them with their textbooks.

Cold calls are the best way to get an interview for an adjunct teaching position. You can make a list of desirable schools, get the chair’s phone number and email from the department website, and then start asking if they need any adjuncts. Sometimes, all you’ll get get is an indifferent no, but I have found myself in brief but polite conversations with chairs who are telling me there’s currently nothing available. Keep in mind many of these people once were like you, young and poor and starving for academic table scraps. It is less often that I get an irate, or otherwise rude chair who is upset at being disturbed with such a mundane inquiry. Most of the time, regardless of immediate need, I am told to email my CV so that they can keep it on file. I have gotten the majority of my teaching assignment through this method.

The other method, which is becoming more and more mandatory these days, is to submit an application to the department’s adjunct pool. Many departments now have a pool of resumes which they sift through whenever they have classes which need staffing. So far, I have landed a total of one job from having my CV in an adjunct pool. I am not a fan of this method, because I feel that it removes us from the process and leaves us adrift. You fill out the district application, attach your CV, mail it in and wait, possibly forever. We adjuncts need these jobs to pay our rent and buy food. We live hand to mouth. To simply expect us to send out applications and only hear back from someone if there’s an interview for us, often waiting as long as a year, is asking too much. We need to know if a job is immediately available, and if we can get an interview. I can see why many schools prefer this method, but from my position it is far from desirable.

If you do land an interview, then you’ve probably got the job. That’s a very bold statement, I know, but I have found it to be true. As I said above, during an interview, you are never tested on your knowledge, skills, or ability to teach. If they have called you in for an interview, then they have looked over your CV, verified that your degrees qualify you for the job, and already determined ahead of time that they have a class for you. At this point, all you need to do is go in and not appear to be a complete freak, and the class is yours. I am sure that department chairs everywhere have all begun swearing at their computer screens as they read this, but in all my years of teaching I have never yet gone into an interview and not gotten at least one class. Oh, and spare me your mumblings of logical fallacies. I’m painting in broad strokes for the purposes of humor, and maybe educating a few saplings, still green in their youth. I know not every teaching interview ends in success; I’m just hot that way.

In a lot of ways, the first term at a new college is your real interview. Most schools will send someone in to watch you teach, evaluate you, and possibly not invite you back even if there’s an unstaffed class. All joking aside, there’s been several colleges that have not asked me back for a second term, and even one that I absolutely refused to return to. Sometimes, they genuinely don’t have another class for you, but more often than not, if you’re not invited back it is because something went wrong.

I’ve twice now had colleges decline to offer me additional classes. In both instances, I never was told that they would not be hiring me again, or why. The phone just didn’t ring. Deep down I knew why they didn’t want me back, and the reasons were ones that would have caused the union leader’s heads to explode, and that’s why no formal reasons were ever given. At one school, I had filed a complaint about another instructor who had held his class thirty minutes late, refused to allow my class to enter, and then became hostile towards me when he finally did surrender the classroom. The chair of my department was furious that I had gone through formal channels to file a complaint, and he irrationally demanded that, in the future, I should keep my mouth shut. I never heard him again again. At another school, a developmentally disabled student had been placed in my English 1A class, and she freaked out over the adult themes (and language used in the class). She complained to her counselor, who complained on her behalf to my chair, who called me to tell me that twice-removed hearsay originating from a student with a developmental disorder was all the testimony she needed. Don’t bring strong material into class, and don’t bother calling us next term, we’ll call you (not). The story that had been the tipping point for this student, by the way, was Margaret Atwood’s “Death By Landscape.”

If things do go otherwise smoothly, then about halfway through your current term you should let your chair know that you want to return. In other words, you need to reapply for your job every 3-4 months. Sometimes they just don’t have any classes available. More often than not, you are absolute last on their list, and they need to wait until the very last minute to see which classes will be left unclaimed by everyone else in the department. Again, this can be very stressful when your rent check depends on your getting rehired. Also, it is very frustrating to juggle 3 districts or so, because you need to be sure that the classes you accept do not conflict with one another.

In the end, I’d be happy to trade them a more intense interview in exchange for better seniority rights, and a faster planning of the schedule. I don’t see anything unreasonable about a prospective professor being grilled on the subject she or he is applying to profess. Why not hand them a sample essay, and ask to see what marks they would make on it, and how they would grade it? Quiz each instructor on the basics of their prospective class. What is an antecedent? How does a semicolon work? In exchange for this intense interview process, the department makes sure to be on top of scheduling. They acknowledge that most adjuncts can’t comfortably wait until the last minute to find out whether or not they’ll be able to pay next month’s rent, and act both accordingly, and compassionately.

The worst thing about being an adjunct is having those at the college, be it your chair, the human resources department, or even the departmental secretary, treat you as if you were not a person with bills to pay and a very insecure occupation. Not knowing in March whether or not you have a job in April is a hell of a stress. So is being told that, oops!, we underpaid you this month, but don’t worry because the computer will get that missing pay to you next month. That’s fine, because Safeway takes I.O.U.’s.

It should always be remembered that we are just trying to do our jobs, and live our lives as best we can. We all hold advanced degrees, something that requires considerable effort, commitment, and sacrifice. We have chosen to contribute to academia despite the lack of full-time work, despite the terrible pay, despite the intensive requirements of the job. Regardless of the situation, we should be seen as human beings, struggling human beings, and treated always with the utmost respect.

For those of you wondering what adjunct teachers get paid, here is my paycheck.

That is a one-month paycheck for one 3-unit class. Each district that I teach at pays me only once per month, not every two weeks. I receive five paychecks of equal size for this particular class. So, the total I get paid is $2,508.90 gross, $2,372.20 net, for one semester long 3-unit college class. Excluding summer classes, that means at this particular district if I were to pick up my maximum load of 10 units, both in fall and spring, then my yearly pay would be $16,726 gross. So that’s the short answer. As an adjunct, at an average district I get paid $16,726 per year.

By state law those 10 units are 69% of a full-time workload, and are the maximum that I can teach at any one district. So, just for laughs, let’s say the pay stayed the same and I got an additional 31% workload at another district, then I would be pulling in a total of $21,911.06 gross per year after we include that extra $5,185.06. This is all assuming a perfect workload, however, and it is never as easy as all that. For starters, at this district my department only offers 3 unit classes, and thus the most I could ever teach is 9 units per term, since there are no 1 unit classes. Also, I’ve never been asked to teach a full 9 unit workload, they just don’t have that many classes available. Sometimes I get two classes, but as you can see from my above paycheck, right now I am only teaching one class at this district. I currently am on the books at three districts, buy was only given classes at two of them.

Your pay will vary from district to district, especially when you teach at a district that has quarter terms instead of semesters, but for the most part the above numbers are the relative average.

Again, for the above district I am only allowed to teach a total of 10 units per term. Any more would make me a full-timer and qualify me for absurd luxuries such as medical and dental benefits, as well as paid time off. So, in order to carve out a living, I work at several different districts, picking up classes wherever I can. This is not an easy thing to do. Most districts are never hiring, not even adjuncts, and those that are seldom can give you more than a single class. Even if you do get a couple classes at a couple districts, they often overlap, and you are forced to decline some classes based on the unfortunate physical limitations that prevent you from being at two places at once. Damn you, Physics! I have found that once I tell a chair, “Sorry, but I am unavailable for that class,” then I almost never hear from them again.

So what do adjunct professors really get paid? Well, as you can imagine after reading the above, it varies from month to month, and term to term. The ideal would be to get four classes, which something I seldom manage to accomplish. Right now, I am teaching three. One is at the semester-based district, which means 5 equal paychecks from January 31-May 31. The other two are at a quarter-based district, which means three payments, ending on March 31. About six weeks ago, I found out they had another class for me in Spring (April-June), but as you can see, this will cause my monthly income to drop when the semester-based class ends in May. Aside from summer (which I will discuss in just one moment), the next semester is in the fall, and that means even if I manage to book classes (of which there is no guarantee) then I won’t get paid again until September 30. Hellllloooooo unemployment.

What about summer, you ask?

Here’s the deal with summer terms at most colleges: they are short, offer only a fraction of classes, and usually only go to full-timers and those with seniority. A summer class, on average, is about 6 weeks long. You get paid the exact same amount for this class as you would a spring or fall course, because technically it is the same amount of working hours compressed into a short, yet more intense, span of time. So take those five months of paychecks I was getting in the spring, and then compress them into one big fat lump sum. Considering that you get in six weeks what would have taken you five months to receive, summer classes are seen by most teachers as a gold mine.

The drawbacks are that these classes are long, often 4-5 hours per day, 4-5 days per week. As such, you might only get (or be able to handle) one class, and I have never heard of a district that gives anyone more than two summer classes to teach.

I just found out today that I will be teaching one class this summer. So instead of June, my paychecks will stop coming on July 31. I have no idea if I will be getting any classes, at any district, for the fall. If I do, the earliest paycheck is September 30. So, as I said before, Hellllloooooo unemployment.

Uh, hello?

Are academics different? This is the question Distinguished University Professor Stanley Fish asks in his latest New York Times Op-Ed blog. Professor Fish, as you might recall, recently wrote about adjuncts such as myself were the reason most universities were fast transforming into University of Phoenix clones. Professor Fish wasn’t done sharing his enlightened criticism of those instructors unfortunate enough not to be him, and so he decided to go after another non-issue, the professorial indulgences of academic freedom.

Fish:

Last week’s column about Denis Rancourt, a University of Ottawa professor who is facing dismissal for awarding A-plus grades to his students on the first day of class and for turning the physics course he had been assigned into a course on political activism, drew mostly negative comments.

The criticism most often voiced was that by holding Rancourt up as an example of the excesses indulged in by those who invoke academic freedom, I had committed the fallacy of generalizing from a single outlier case to the behavior of an entire class “Is the Rancourt case one of a thousand such findings this year, or it the most outlandish in 10 years?” (Jack, No. 88).

For those of you unaware of what a fallacy is, allow me to explain. A fallacy is an argument which may convince others but is not logically sound. It is essentially a defect in an argument which then causes the argument to be invalid.

Most people get introduced to fallacies in high school, and most colleges require all students to take at least one logic class which teaches not just how to identify logical fallacies, but why they are not a valid method of argument. It is too bad that, during his superior college education which Fish went on and on about receiving, Fish never had to take a class on fallacies. Or, I suppose, maybe he did have to take the class but just didn’t pay very close attention, because here in his article for the New York Times our Distinguished Professor begins by stating a fallacy of hasty generalization.

Now, as any freshman college class can tell you (did you spot the fallacy I just committed?), a hasty generalization involves basing a broad conclusion upon the statistics of a survey of a small group that fails to sufficiently represent the whole population.

E.g., “Wow! Did you see that teenager run that red light? Teenage drivers are really pathetic.”
This is otherwise known as Leaping to A Conclusion. Or, to paraphrase Professor Fish, “Wow! Did you read about that professor who just gave everyone an A on the first day of class? Professors have too much academic freedom!”

As Fish himself admits, he got hundreds of letters pointing out the flaw in his logic. Naturally, he disregarded these letters and instead insisted, “No, really guys, it’s totally what professors are like!” Or as he put it:

It may be outlandish because it is so theatrical, but one could argue, as one reader seemed to, that Rancourt carries out to its logical extreme a form of behavior many display in less dramatic ways. “How about a look at the class of professors who … duck their responsibilities ranging from the simple courtesies (arrival on time, prepared for meetings … ) to the essentials (“lack of rigor in teaching and standards … )” (h.c.. ecco, No. 142). What links Rancourt and these milder versions of academic acting-out is a conviction that academic freedom confers on professors the right to order (or disorder) the workplace in any way they see fit, irrespective of the requirements of the university that employs them.

Whoa! Slow down there, Professor. How exactly do you make the leap from your anecdotal fallacy of professors not arriving to class on time, or not being prepared for meetings (a guy on the internet posted about how he sees professors do this all the time, therefore it must be true!) to professors reordering the workplace in whatever way they see fit. As he slips down his slope, Fish desperately wants to start quoting Ghostbusters: “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”

College professors get a lot of freedom when it comes to running their classes. We can dress as we want, and be addressed as we prefer. We usually can choose what textbooks we teach from, and almost always can decide for ourselves if we want to lecture or do group work. We can shift the emphasis of our lessons to what we feel that emphasis should be upon. Most significant of all, we don’t have a boss looking over our back, and this is at the root of what is bothering Professor Fish.

You see, with great power comes great responsibility. If a teacher wanted to, then they could probably get away with cutting corners, such as ending class early (or starting it late), handing back essays without detailed comments, canceling lessons on core concepts, or just showing a lot of movies. I met enough teachers who do these things, some out of laziness, others out of disgruntled apathy, and even a few who don’t realize what it is they are doing (or not doing, as the case were).

But there are advantages to our freedom as well. I can choose the textbook that I feel is the most effective for my class. This may seem like a small matter, but I believe that if I was forced to use a different textbook for, say, my grammar class, then the quality of that class would decrease sharply due to my lack of familiarity and lack of ease with the book. Having the ability to judge for myself which book is best for my class is advantageous for all my students. I am a college professor, and I have been hired to profess, to convey a set of skills and base of information that requires my presence. I am not a customer service agent, I do not simply need basic training and a script to follow. My role in the classroom is the most important, so much so that my ability and will to succeed can effect whether a student succeeds. It is, in my opinion, one of the most important and sacred jobs there is. It does not mean I am sacred or holy, as Professor Fish sneering states some teachers think of themselves, but it means that I take my duty with the utmost gravity.

Fish:

It would be hard to imagine another field of endeavor in which employees believe that being attentive to their employer’s goals and wishes is tantamount to a moral crime But this is what many (not all) academics believe, and if pressed they will support their belief by invoking a form of academic exceptionalism, the idea that while colleges and universities may bear some of the marks of places of employment — work-days, promotions, salaries, vacations, meetings, etc. — they are really places in which something much more rarefied than a mere job goes on.

I disagree that my goals and my employer’s goals are different, because my employer is the university and I am the university. The Vice Chancellor of Planning, the campus security guards, the Human Resources office, these things are all in place because of one thing: the classroom. The school exists for the students, and by the teachers.

I do not believe that I could do my job effectively if I was micromanaged in the way Fish wants. At best, he is looking at academia from a very high position: the frustrated Dean who can’t get those miserable adjuncts to show up on time or stick to a lesson plan. He’d probably love The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success.

At our department meetings, angry letters from people no one has ever met come flooding in. They are letters from people like Fish, complaining about our productivity, something they have somehow managed to quantify into numerical form. They would like us to become proactive in getting up student enrollment. They would like to inform us that there is no money left to put paper in the copier, or buy us dry-erase markers. There is money to hire another 10 Vice Presidents, and they would like us to mentally congratulate these folks, whom we shall never meet, on their superior positions and salaries. They would like full-timers to crowd three to an office, and the adjuncts to continue going without any office at all. Fish would also like us to not think so highly of ourselves. We need to know our place, I suppose.

He concludes by saying:

Those who would defend academic freedom would do well to remove the halo it often wears.

I take great offense to that statement.

I am never late to class, in fact, I am always at least fifteen minutes early.

I have never once used my position to further my own political or personal agenda. I feel that to do so is a violation of my role as teacher. I do not tell them what I believe about any subject other than the subject of the lesson. In my advanced English classes, I teach them critical thought and analysis. After they have learned how to approach an issue with these skills, then they can make their own determinations.

PART 2
(Click here to read PART 1)

This seminar was not just a failure, but also a major failure. The idea behind this seminar was to show how collaborative learning can be more effective than traditional lecturing, but it ended up proving the exact opposite. We were unable to complete small tasks in a timely fashion (in fact, no task was fully completed). Most people complained of the tedium and irrelevance of the exercises in our groups, and keep in mind we were all teachers. Imagine a student’s reaction.

In addition to this, no information was successfully gained from the group work. Most of the time was spent with us sharing ideas that we already had, and new information was only gained when we left our groups and the professor leading the seminar proceeded to lecture further about the subject.

The theory is that a group exploring a topic collaboratively will be more successful than the traditional lecture, retain, and repeat (via test) method. There is some truth to this, and I use a combination of lecture, group work, and independent study in all my classes. However, it has become too trendy (and too easy) to reject traditional teaching methods in favor of a more “free-learning” experience. The professor leading the seminar told us that her classes are 100% collaborative learning environments. She hands out worksheets, organizes groups, and then lets the students figure it out in their groups. She said that she has a rule in which she will not answer any student’s questions about anything until that student has asked at least three other students if they know the answer. This includes everything from questions regarding the syllabus, to questions about the final exam. I couldn’t help but feel that one reason she prefers this purely collaborative method is that she simply has to hand out worksheets, and then sit back and let the students do the rest. I imagine the students who already posses the information and skills that the class requires will succeed in this environment (”Okay! We’re outlining a speech about our family today. I know how to do that, its easy!”), while those who are unclear and have questions will be unable to learn much (especially if they can’t ask their teacher until asking three classmates), and will ultimately fail the class (or, pass the class with a C, and move on having learned nothing).

Remember when I said that there was another voice of dissent during the Peanuts cartoon farce? After our groups had aborted, and we returned to the class as a whole, the professor leading the seminar commented on how allowing Rerun to explore his art more freely would likely make him a better artist. An instructor raised his hand, and told us that he was, in fact, an art teacher himself. He politely explained that if his students did not follow his specific instructions, it would not make them better artists.

“But don’t you think they should learn creativity?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he replied. “I think creativity is good, but if I have asked them to sketch still life, then I need them to follow my instructions and sketch still life. If they do something different, then they will not learn techniques such as cross hatching, or drawing perspective, or shadowing. If they all just did what they wanted and disregarded my instructions, then they would never learn these techniques on their own. One lesson leads to the next lesson, first you draw still life then you learn figure drawing, and you must learn one before the other. So perhaps in this cartoon the teacher was trying to teach the student a skill, and he refused to learn it because he just wanted to do his own thing. You can do your own thing all you want outside of class. You come to class to learn a skill that you cannot learn on your own. So you need to follow instructions and listen to your teacher in order to do this.”

I applauded him, as did a few others, but the professor leading the seminar suddenly got a look on her face as if she smelled a really ripe fart, and quickly moved on to the next group activity.

There was another moment where I looked proudly up at one of my fellow attending adjuncts. After the scavenger hunt, just before we were let out, the professor leading the seminar was again discussing the importance of group work, stressing the need to learn social skills and interaction. A chemistry teacher raised her hand and admitted that, even after our four-hour seminar, she still didn’t see how she could incorporate social interaction skills into her chemistry class. Again, the seminar leader responded by stressing ideas which only promoted the students interacting with one another, sharing their names and interests, working together to complete a puzzle, etc. She boasted that these social skills happened to be what her most prized class, Speech 10, was all about. A different instructor raised his hand and said, “Yes, I think these are some really good exercises for a Speech 10 class, but I think they may not have direct applications for a lot of other classes, even in Speech, that don’t set out to teach inter-personal skills as a goal. In fact, I teach Speech 1A and I mostly lecture. They independently give their speeches, and group work is kept at a minimum.”

“I don’t teach Speech 1A,” she told him in a hoity manner. “I teach Speech 10.”

“Well,” said the adjunct, “I do teach Speech 1A, and I couldn’t see using a lot of these activities in that class. They wouldn’t accomplish the goals of the class. It sounds great for Speech 10, but not Speech 1A. If I can’t even translate these exercises to meet my goals for a Speech 1A class, then I doubt other instructors here, who teach vastly different subjects, can use them as heavily as you’re saying we should.”

Frustrated, the professor leading the seminar blurted out, “It is important that these kids learn how to interact with one another!”

And there you have it. The fatal flaw in this seminar was that the professor leading it viewed her college students as children, and felt that shaping their ability to play well with others trumped any course objectives, skills or outcomes. If a fellow speech professor felt that this level of collaborative learning wouldn’t even apply to other speech classes, then as a teaching method intended to replace the traditional lecture it is fatally flawed.

At the end of the seminar I told her my classes utilized lecture, class discussion, independent study, and even a little group work. Of the four, my classes were primarily lecture and class discussion. I asked her if she considered class discussion, where all students are encouraged and required to voice their ideas, their analysis, their questions and concerns, to be a form of collaborative learning. “Aren’t we then functioning as one big group?” I asked her. “With me their as their teacher to guide the direction of the discussion, and make sure that all the learning outcomes are accomplished?”

“No,” she told me. “That isn’t collaborative learning. If all you do is lecture, and then just call on students who raise their hand, then they’ll never learn how to interact with each other.”

Oh well. At least they’d still learn class objectives such as cross hatching, or the periodic table of elements, or how to give a speech.

PART 1
(Click here to read PART 2)

I recently attended a collaborative learning seminar, and although it provided me with great material for this blog, it did not do much in the way of making me a better teacher. On second thought, strike that, because it did make me a better teacher by way of showing me exactly what I should never do.

Collaborative learning is an unnecessarily fancy way of saying group work, and that is what this seminar was all about: how to give your students group work. This may seem like the most unnecessary, worthless, asinine waste of time, but I got paid $100 for attending.

Of additional interest to the site is the fact that all the attending instructors of the seminar were adjuncts. A tenured professor of speech led the seminar, and most of the activities seemed to be best geared for a speech class.

Here are my notes from the seminar, which I meticulously took in order to capture how it was both ineffective and of no use whatsoever. However, I’m afraid that the only accurate way to simulate the mind-crushing tedium of the four hour long seminar is to have a friend gently lower a refrigerator onto your head. Enjoy!

•We spent the first 45 minutes playing “The Name Game!” This is an icebreaker game where the entire class forms a circle, and then people introduce themselves one at a time, in clockwise order. The trick, however, is that before you can introduce yourself, you must first say “Hello, (name)!” to each person who has already introduced themselves. In other words, “Hello Sally! Hello Ted! Hello Vickram!” etc. The merits of performing this activity in Chemistry 1A, Physical Anthropology, or a World Geography class (all classes that various instructors present at the meeting taught) was never fully explained. It is beyond the capabilities of my comprehension why we had to actually engage in this activity ourselves, instead of just being told, “An effective ice-breaker is having everyone say their name, and also to say and remember the names of their classmates.”

We were told the The Name Game! took about 10 minutes, tops. Our seminar was about half the size of an average classroom, and it took us 45 minutes.

There were follow-up questions. “Should we have students give their last names too?” and “Would you advise us asking students to also name a hobby or activity that they enjoy?” Answer to the latter: Yes, if that hobby or activity begins with the same letter as their name.

•Next, the professor leading the seminar took about 10 minutes to explain the concept of group work. Actual quote: “Now, you can expect to have them work in this group in class, but it is unlikely that this group will continue out of class.”

•Oh, but what happens to a teacher’s role when collaborative learning is taking place? Again, actual quote: “You must learn as a teacher to move from, the sage on the stage, to the guide on the side.” Snappy!

•Next lesson: How to select group members. According to a three-page handout that took 15 minutes to get through, teachers can point at four students and say, “You four are in a group.” This process can be repeated until all students are in groups. It was at this point that I noticed my left ear was bleeding.

•We spent the next 30 minutes analyzing a Peanuts cartoon. The gist: Rerun and Sally are drawing in class. Sally looks at what Rerun has drawn, and informs him “We’re supposed to be drawing flowers!” Rerun then proudly explains that he found the assignment too limiting, and instead created an elaborate and imaginative series of comic book like illustrations. However, after showing these creative drawings to his teacher, Rerun sullenly returns to his desk and says, “Teacher says we’re drawing flowers today.” Ho-ho!

We were placed into our own groups (if confused about how you put people into groups, please see the 3 page handout entitled, “The Most Unnecessary Thing That Needs Fucking Explaining”) and then we are told to analyze the lesson learned in the Peanuts comic. Our starting question: What do you think the teacher was thinking when Rerun showed her his off-assignment drawing, and do you agree with her assessment? I suggested that the teacher was thinking what all teachers think when students don’t do what you have asked them to do, which is, “I don’t get paid enough for this shit.” I said that if indeed the teacher was thinking this, then I agreed with her. The other members in my group felt that Rerun should have been encouraged to explore his creativity, and that the teacher should not stifle students by relying on traditional, old-fashioned teaching methods. The rest of the class also came to this conclusion. There was one other adjunct who was the exception to this, but I’ll talk about him later.

•As we were lectured about the difference between communicating and meta-communicating (spoilers: one means “to share or exchange information” and the other is just bullshit jingoism) a thought occurred to me: just how much was this seminar costing the school? I was being paid $100 to be there, as was every other adjunct instructor there. I counted heads, and found there to be 19 people present. That’s $1,900 right there. I don’t know what the professor leading the seminar was getting paid, but I’d imagine that she wasn’t working for free. I would guess she was getting at least $500, maybe more. At that district, I get paid about $2,500 gross per 4-unit class, per semester that I teach. I think it is safe to say that if this collaborative learning seminar had been canceled, then the money could have been used to give one of us adjuncts an extra class to teach.

Budget cuts caused a record number of class cuts this semester, and more are expected just over the horizon. A lot of students were unable to take the classes that they needed due to these cuts. This seminar was also one of five total that was being offered for adjuncts over a two-month period. Now, while not all of them may be as useless as this one (we’ll find out, I registered for all five), I think that it would have been in everyone’s best interest to just add 5 extra classes to the schedule, much to the adjunct’s and student’s benefit.

•We get to do Parrot Partners! Yay! We are teamed up in pairs and we each tell our partner our opinion on a subject, in this case the effectiveness of collaborative learning. Our partner must then repeat the essence of what we have told them back to us, using their own words but not adding or taking away any details. This goes on for about 25 minutes before the professor leading the seminar has to call an end to this activity. Time is running out and we have to move on. My partner had only just begun telling me why I thought traditional lectures and tests were far superior to this style of collaborative learning.

•We learn the Wall-Line game. Another time-eating exercise we don’t finish. We are asked our opinion of a subject, and all form a line with those that “Strongly Agree” at one end, and those that “Strongly Disagree” at the other. The idea is that we must explain our positions to each other in order to agree upon a ranking. In other words, if two or three people all think they should be at the very end of Strongly Agree, then they must work out who really agrees more strongly than the others by explaining their position. The prompt we were given was, “Collaborative Learning is the best teaching method.” While most of the other teachers bumbled around at the Strongly Agree end, I walked confidently to the opposite side at Strongly Disagree, and twiddled my thumbs until someone who had been deemed not to agree as strongly as the others was forced down towards me and had to explain themselves. Time was called before they could finish talking about how great group work such as this was, and without me being able to express my opinion at all.

•I realized that the focus of almost all these group exercises was to teach the students how to interact with one another. The goals of these group activities were always to encourage better social behavior, and never (as far as I could tell) to teach information or skills specific to a class. In other words, there were no applications of The Name Game, The Peanuts Cartoon, The Wall-Line, The Parrot Partners, or The Scavenger Hunt (see next) beyond social exercises. A Physical Anthropology class couldn’t teach a chapter from its textbook using The Wall-Line.

•The final hour of the seminar was spent breaking us into groups and having us do a building-wide scavenger hunt. We were given clues as to where to look within the building for various forms of information (when the building was made, what purpose it was intended for, etc) and we needed to first find our own specific information, and then exchange that information with the other groups. This activity was a colossal fail. Forgiving the fact that it was more of a sixth grade activity than one for the college classroom, it gobbled up the entire hour, everyone in my group (college professors, remember) bitched and moaned about it, and at the end no one had successfully gathered all the necessary information. We ended up aborting it, and being told, “You get the general idea.”

•Each of us is given one portrait of Mr. Benjamin Franklin.

To be continued…

One of the stories that I require my students to read and analyze is “Brownies” by ZZ Packer. It is the story of an all-black Brownie Scout troop that goes off to camp and finds there is an all-white Brownie Scout troop there as well. The Brownies instantly want to kick the asses of each and every white girl in Troop 909, and they soon have an excuse when Arnetta hears one of the Troop 909 girls use the word nigger. The Brownies confront some of the Troop 909 girls in the bathroom, intending to beat the snot out of them, but discover that the Troop 909 girls aren’t just white, they’re developmentally disabled.

The story is not so much about racism as it is about children acting out the same hatreds of their parents, often without cause or reason. After the discovery that Troop 909 is developmentally disabled, we learn from their counselor that many of the girls are echolalic, which means they repeat what they hear without knowing what they are saying. If they did say the n-word, it was just an echo of what they may have heard from their parents, and this becomes a very clear parallel to the Brownies looking for a reason to beat up Troop 909 because of their race, an echo from their own parents.

It is a great story for analysis and discussion, and I always enjoy bringing it into class.

Last week, however, things didn’t go too smoothly.

I have two students, let’s call them Beverly and Tom. Both happen to be the only black students in my class. During discussion, Tom said something along the lines of, “I found myself questioning whether Arnetta is a reliable witness. Later, she couldn’t identify the girl who called them niggers, and I just feel she probably made it all up in order to start trouble.

Beverly, who was sitting two seats down from him, recoiled visibly when he said nigger, and before he had finished his sentence she demanded, “Will you please not use that word!”

Let me also take a moment to point out that these are, without doubt, the top two students in this class. At this moment, I remembered a very well written paper Beverly had turned in at the start of the semester about how she did not think anyone, including African-Americans, should use the n-word. Now she was voicing that belief in class.

“I think the important thing to remember,” I said carefully, uneasy with the subject, “is that Tom was using…that word…in analysis of the story. He didn’t say it at, or about anyone, and there was no intent to offend. Let’s focus on intent, and the fact that this is a respectful discussion among scholars.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “And I’m black.”

At this, Beverly visibly scoffed (this may be because Tom is much lighter skinned than Beverly), and Tom immediately took offense to this reaction. Trouble was brewing, and I decided to chicken out instead of going with my gut.

“I don’t think it is unreasonable,” I said, mostly to Tom, “for her to ask that we simply refer to…that word…as racial slur, racial epitaph, or just the n-word.”

Tom didn’t like this, and I didn’t blame him. It was the chicken-shit approach, and I was coddling Beverly unnecessarily.

“Well, then!” Tom continued, clearly annoyed. “What I was saying is that I think Arnetta might have been acting like, oh you…a total b-word.” He sarcastically acted like he should not even have said b-word, and it struck home for me how ridiculous it was for me to ask him to refrain from referring to a word that had appeared in the story I had assigned.

Tom is indeed an excellent student, and he had been hanging out with me before and after class, drilling me with questions about being a college professor, because he was very interested in teaching math after he graduated. I felt as though I had let him down. Actually, I felt that I’d let them both down. The whole class, in fact.

In my syllabus, for every class I teach, even introduction to grammar, there is a section that reads:

Also, please be notified that some students may deem some class content objectionable. It is not the instructor’s intention to offend, but to challenge students to analyze and interpret new ideas and concepts.

This was given to me during my time at the University of Arizona. My mentor had told me that students needed to be challenged, and they needed to be uncomfortable. The ultimate point of learning is to go outside ourselves, find something new; force ourselves to leave our safe boxes and be challenged by the world around us. I’ve required devout Catholics to write persuasive arguments in favor of legalized abortion, forced fierce liberals to rhetorically analyze Rush Limbaugh without passing any form of personal judgment, made countless conservatives and moralistic persons read stories about rape and suicide, not to mention the recreational drug use of a character named Fuckhead. I should have forced Beverly to hear the word nigger, not hurled at her or anyone else, but just spoken of in analysis of a story about how racism is passed from parent to child without anyone even noticing.

The worst part is that if Tom and Beverly hadn’t been black then I could have done it, no problem. The fact that I was white, that they were of color, all the history and hate and things associated with that word, intimidated me. I couldn’t stand there and tell a young, highly intelligent black woman that she had to sit and deal with this guy using the word nigger.

And if the situation were to ever repeat itself, I don’t think I’ll be capable of doing anything differently.

There is one constant, one fact, one basis of reality, which unites all teachers of all colors and creeds, everywhere: We don’t get paid enough for this shit.

The second, without question, is that no matter what subject we teach we need to make a lot of copies.

I’ve worked at many different colleges, and everyone has their own way of providing instructors with copier access. The most common setup is that there is a reprographics center where you bring your originals, fill out a request, sign a form that says you are not reproducing copyrighted material without permission, hand over the copyrighted material which you of course did not obtain permission to reproduce, and wait at least 24 hours for the work to be completed.

The best system I ever encountered was at a school whose English Department had their own high-end copy machine that we instructors were free to use anytime, and with no limits. Oh, I remember it fondly. That sucker could spit out 100 correlated and stapled copies of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Third And Final Continent” in ten minutes flat. Did I mention no limits? Some schools give you a personal code with a set number of credits on it. If you go over, you’re screwed. There was nothing more freeing for me as an instructor to rest assured that if I needed copies of my tests, short stories, handouts, or other materials for class that I would be able to get them, printed quickly, and with no hassle. Ah, those were the days.

Last Thursday I walked into our college’s mailroom, where sits the best mimeograph machine that the 1973 Soviet Union had to offer. Every single instructor for the entire campus shares this one machine. As usual, it had a giant OUT OF ORDER sign taped to it. Alternatives? Slim. The school’s reprographics office is really the student copy center. We instructors can request copies there, but the center will charge our department exactly what they would have charged students. We’ve been told by our chair to only use “reprographics” if we absolutely, positively need to, and that they will know damn well who we are and how many copies we are charging to the department. They also take several days to process any request, even small ones. I had a class starting in twenty minutes and needed 25 copies of a one-page quiz. There was only one copier left on campus that I could use.

In the back of our division office, in the instructor’s break room, there is a copier even older than the one in the mailroom. We are each allowed only 10 copies per day on it. A sign taped above the copier tells us this, and also says (I shit you not) that we are being video taped even though, and I quote, “You can’t see the camera, but it’s there!” Did I mention this is in the instructor’s break room? No students allowed, only teachers. That really sets a nice tone towards a group of educators with advanced degrees who need to make copies in order to teach the future minds of our world.

Cameras be damned, I needed 25 copies, and went ahead and started copying my quiz.

When I was at about 17, the Earth shook and the windows rattled. Our gianourmous department secretary, who by my best guess weighs about 550 pounds, did something I had never before seen: she stood up and walked a few feet.

“Ya’ll know you ain’t s’possed to be making more than ten copies, right?” she asked me.

“Hmm?” I played dumb, and smiled blissfully at her.

“Sign says right there,” she pointed rather than walk over to it. I studied the sign curiously, as if for the first time. Yep, 10 copies per day.

“Oh, is that for instructors? I thought that must be for students.”

“Ten copies!” she snapped angrily. “Ya’ll use the mailroom if you need more.”

When I need more? When would I ever need just 10? The smallest class I had ever taught at that school was 25 students.

“The one in the mailroom is out of order,” I told her.

“Not my problem. Go to reprographics then. Go to Kinko’s then. Ten copies in here.”

She then turned around on her heel and lethargically headed back for her cubicle. Loudly, she commented to…I’m guessing either the air or the ghost of her dead co-worker…about ‘people commin’ in here and makin’ copies.’

I find incidents like this very discouraging, and demoralizing. When we have to battle to make copies of a quiz or assignment for our students, then it makes us more and more willing to just say, “Fuck this!” and call it a day. People always angrily rant about teachers who don’t even try, but they never ask why. Why do teachers give up? Why do we start thinking of the job as just another paycheck?

In the above situation, the priority should have been to getting the students their handouts. If I had been in there making copies of my manuscript, or if I constantly was in the office running off assignments at the last minute, then it would have been a different story. What happened was that the school’s main copier was broken, and I needed an alternative. We’ve been yelled at in advance about using reprographics, and even so, it really is just the student copy center, and they would not have done a rush job for me, even though it was only 25 copies. I can’t tell you how many times I do go to Kinko’s, or use my own home printer, to make copies for class and pay out of my own pocket.

The department secretary makes four times what I make (no exaggeration, I heard her mouthing off about her paycheck one day, and it is almost exactly 4X what I make…and I mean my total pay…from all the schools that I work at), and she also has full benefits and the job for life.

After this incident, I pay for the copies myself, or I print them at one of the two other schools I teach at.

I don’t go into the division office anymore.

“Oh, I’m not a professor.”

This is one of the most common things I used to find myself saying to students in the first few weeks of class. I always ask students to call me by my first name, but sure enough, one of them will soon raise their hand with a question and ask, “Professor…?”

While in grad school I was fortunate enough to be offered a two-year teaching assistantship at the University of Arizona. Each semester, we were given a few classes to teach while we pursued our degrees, and we also got to take part in a comprehensive teacher training program and mentorship, which covered absolutely every aspect of teaching rhetoric and composition at the college level. It was a great deal all around. We received excellent and extensive teaching training, and built up our CV by teaching freshman courses. The University loved it because they paid us in peanuts and tuition waivers instead of hiring any adjuncts, who might have demanded actual currency as pay. It was win-win…until we graduated, and were told that we were no longer hirable to teach the classes we’d been teaching for the last few years.

One day, our advisor made it clear that we were not to go around calling ourselves professors. He explained that a few GATs had once been overheard calling themselves this, and the real professors, people who clawed their way to tenure through the decade-long rigors of assistant professor, associate professor, etc., were very annoyed that some young, pimple-faced twenty-nine year olds were claiming the title as their own.

“But, aren’t we professors?” one of my fellow graduate students asked.

“No, no,” our mentor laughed. “You are teaching assistants. When you get your degrees, then you’ll be lecturers. Then, you hopefully can get on the tenure track and work your way towards professorship.”

So there you have it. Oh, and the term for us adjuncts isn’t even “lecturer, it’s visiting lecturer. That’s how they explain us disappearing after the only one semester. “He was only visiting. Let us never speak of him again.”

I stayed true to what my mentor taught us. Believe it or not, I had a great respect for anyone who had achieved the full title of professor, and I did not want to violate protocols by grabbing that title for myself before I’d earned it. Whenever students asked, “Professor…?” I would correct them by saying that I was a visiting lecturer. At that point they’d ask, “So…you’re not a real teacher?” Things would go downhill from there.

This all continued until very recently, when I was in a meeting with my department dean. One of my students was present at this meeting, and my dean referred to me as, “Professor…”

I was shocked! My dean knew exactly who and what I was. He knew that I was just an adjunct who was a new arrival to our district. I was only visiting to give a lecture, as they might say. Did he refer to me as a professor because a student was present? Was it just a slip of the lip? Did different schools perhaps have different policies about this sort of thing? I decided to investigate further.

As usual, wikipedia holds all the answers:

The meaning of the word professor (Latin: professor, person who professes to be an expert in some art or science, teacher of highest rank[1]) varies. In some English-speaking countries, it refers to a senior academic who holds a departmental chair, especially as head of the department, or a personal chair awarded specifically to that individual.

This is consistent with what I was taught at the University of Arizona. However:

…whereas in the United States, Canada and Hong Kong, the term professor is used as a form of address for any lecturer or researcher employed by a college or university, regardless of rank.

That would fit more with my situation. Further reading of the article, and a browsing of the actual job titles of my full-time colleagues, clears things up a bit. One thing to keep in mind is that most of the schools I lecture at are community colleges. So far, none of these community colleges have any of their positions or job titles listed as professor, but rather everyone who is full-time is simply an instructor or lecturer.

Here’s the key, still from wikipedia:

In colloquial language, usage of the term may refer to any educator at the post-secondary level, yet a considerable percentage of post-secondary educators do not hold the formal title of “professor,” but are instead lecturers, instructors, and teaching assistants.

So in other words, here in these United States, any lecturer, instructor or even teaching assistant can be called “professor” while not actually having the title of Professor. I think this is very similar to the naval custom of addressing any officer who commands a ship as “captain” regardless of rank.

So what do I take from all this? That I am not a Professor, and my full-time colleagues at community colleges are not Professors, but our students can address us all as professor? The capitalization alone for this particular post is giving me a headache.

Fellow teachers, I want to settle this, but I need your help.

Fill me in on your thoughts and understanding of this subject. What’s the proper way for us to use “professor”, especially for adjuncts and community college teachers? Besides wikipedia, I have not been able to find a clear guide to this on the internet. If you know of one, post it. Otherwise, post what you know, and I’ll try to create one here.