It had been one week and still no change of grade. As I said in my previous post, usually this takes an hour to get done.

I assumed the student workers had lost the grade change form.  So I brought a new form into my dean.  He walked over to his desk and retrieved a big book that apparently lists all incoming forms.  He flipped the pages until he found my name.

“Yep,” he says to me. “I got the form last week. No need for another.”

“Oh,” I said. “I wonder why the grade still hasn’t been changed yet.”

“That’s because it needs my signature, and I haven’t signed it yet,” the dean told me.  ”If the student is in a hurry, then you should attach a note explaining that I need to put a rush on it. Otherwise, I’ll get to it when I get to it.”

All he has to do is sign it.  It’s been on his desk for one week.  After bringing all this to his attention, I assumed he’d grab the form and sign it.  Instead, he left for lunch.

I swear to god he didn’t just leave, but left specifically for lunch.

We’re doomed.

As usual, it was utter pandemonium on campus on the first day of classes.  I have no idea of the actual numbers, but we have an enormous amount of people who are present during the first 2-3 weeks of classes that do not last the rest of the quarter.  In other words, there are a huge number of students who aren’t really students and only think they are students but shouldn’t be there to begin with. They enroll, swarm the campus, and dropout after only a few short weeks.  This is one of the many problems with community colleges: we invite the entire community to come take classes, but not everyone can handle a college class.  As a result of this temporary population spike, parking spaces are gone, supplies spent, classes full and over enrolled, books are gone from the library and the bookstore, and walking around campus is suddenly like being on the overcrowded city streets of Beijing or Calcutta.

I walk into the Teacher Services office, a small closet of a room that is meant to serve as an exclusive access point for faculty needing to deal with Admissions & Records.  Amazingly, it is empty.  Foolishly, I assume this will be easy.  Just fill out the short form, drop it off in the basket, and go on with the rest of my life, right? Ha.

A student worker is at the window.  I think it is good to provide part-time employment and financial assistance to students in the form of student work on campus, but this is quickly becoming a replacement for actual trained and competent workers. Stick the students at the help desk in the library, please, or relegate them to grunt work such as making copies, delivering letters, filing forms, etc.  Already, the student looks confused.  “Did you need…?” he begins, trailing off, hoping desperately I will say that I need nothing from him and relieve him of any responsibility.

“I need to submit a change of grade for one of my students,” I tell him.

“Yes, okay. And you are the teacher?” he asks.

Standing there in my suit and tie, and having just identified myself as such, I nod.

“Just a moment…” he says uncertainly, and disappears into the catacombs of cubicles behind him.  I see many vacant desks back in the galleys of Admissions & Records, but I also note many of them are occupied with actual adults.  Several look up at me and I try my best to mentally command them to come see if they can assist me, but alas, I stand in silence for the next ten minutes.

A different student worker returns to the window.

“Can I help you?” he asks.

“I need to submit a change of grade form,” I tell him.

He turns confidently to the shelf behind him.  He pulls forms after form from the shelf and looks at each one with growing depression.  Finally, he turns back to me empty handed.

“We’re out of forms,” he says apologetically.  “You can download one off of your MyPortal account, print it, fill it out, and then drop it off here if you like.”

“I’m an adjunct,” I tell him. “I don’t have an office, or a computer that I can access on campus, and I certainly don’t have a printer.”  There are rows and rows of computers on the desks behind him.  “Can you print it for me?”

“Uh…let me check…”  He disappears.

After about ten minutes the first student worker walks by.  I notice an actual adult employee signal him and overhear her ask him “Has he been helped?”  The two stare at me.

“I’m helping him now,” the original student worker assures her.

“I need to submit a change of grade form,” I shout politely, with a very big smile, across to the adult employee. She nods, assured, and returns to her desk.  The original student worker comes up to me and says that they are all out of forms, but that if I log onto MyPortal, I can print one out.

I relay to him my office-less, computer-less, printer-less status.

Thinking on his feet, the student turns his computer monitor around and passes me his keyboard.  The monitor and keyboard don’t quite reach me, but I lean over the counter and begin to log on.  Each teacher has a unique, unchangeable, random access number.  Since they were randomly generated, cannot be changed, and are ten digits long, I do not have mine memorized.  I begin to log onto my email account, where a keep a copy of my login number stored.  The student attempts to assist me by moving the mouse over to the MyPortal tab and clicking it for me as I log into my email, redirecting me from Gmail and to the school’s login portal.

“There you go!” he says helpfully unhelpful.

“Thanks,” I say, and log back into Gmail in order to get my access code.  Eventually, I retrieve it and log into the faculty portal.  I turn the monitor back to the student and say, “Alright, I’m logged in.  Go ahead and print the form.”

The student looks at the screen confused. “I don’t know where it is,” he confesses, “I just was told it is on your portal. I’ve never actually seen one of these before. I’m a student.”

Groaning, I look through the list and locate the form myself.  He prints it, and I fill it out quickly. The information they need from me is my name, signature, student’s name, student’s ID number, class name and number, and what grade the student is supposed to have received. It takes me thirty second to fill out the form.

As I hand it over, the second student worker returns with a giant stack of papers.  “I ran off more copies of the form!” he says triumphantly.  He hands me one, but I hand it back to him.

“You just need your dean’s signature,” the first student worker tells me.  Sure enough, a new field has been added to the grade change form: dean’s signature.  I don’t know my dean.  He’s not someone I see or interact with.  Now, apparently, I have to.  I take the form back from the student and walk across campus to my dean’s office.

My dean isn’t in his office. His door is locked and there is no note.  The department office itself is empty.  The administrative assistant is gone.  A student worker comes up to me.  She looks all of eighteen and does not speak very much English.

“Can I help you?” she whispers meekly.  I explain I am looking for the dean, or, failing him, the department secretary.  The student worker informs me the dean has already left for the day and that the department secretary has not yet returned from her lunch break. I check my watch: it is 3:00PM.

I return to Admissions & Records. The two student workers are sitting together, playing a crappy-looking game on their computer.

“Got it?” one of them asks me optimistically.  I explain that the dean was absent, the secretary missing. I explain that the student needs her grade changed, and that I’ve never needed the dean’s signature before.  After some thought, the student worker offers to forward the form to my dean via the college’s inter-office mail system.  he assures me that this is standard procedure, and that the dean will get the form, sign it, and send it back to Admissions & Records again via the inter-office campus mail.  I leave the form with them, and hurry off to teach my class.

One week later, the grade has still not changed.  The student has emailed me twice, quite distressed.  I have no means of contact for Admissions & Records. I have emailed my dean, but not received any reply.

As I finish this post, I decide that I should print the form on my computer at home, fill it out, sign it, and attempt to take it to the dean again tomorrow, hopefully get his signature, and then take the complete form back to Admissions & Records.

My final thought: if something as simple as this is this hard to accomplish, imagine what would be involved in attempting to do something truly difficult yet meaningful in today’s academia.  Think of all the meetings, and deans, and chairs, and vice-chancellors, and vice-presidents, and administrators…what the hell are they doing with their time?  Where are we headed with them at the wheel?

My inbox dings.  Another teacher, who like everyone else had a waitlist out the door, asks whether new classes will be created for all these students who could not get in.  The chair of the department quickly replies: no new classes will be added, but we are 4% under our enrollment numbers and should do whatever we can to raise that number for the good of the college.  That, for those who could not translate, means adding above to 30-student maximum, perhaps to level of 35, 40, even 45 students in a small classroom.

They cut our classes, close positions, fire us, and those that remain are told we don’t have enough students enrolled.  Services continue to be cut, positions eliminated. The administrators are at lunch, gone for the day. The student workers do the work for credits.

One district that I taught at wanted to see copies of my medical bills every six months, and then would reimburse me either half my expenses or $600, whichever was smaller. Guess which one it always was?

Another district allowed me to buy into their HMO plan. They’d put me and my life partner on the HMO plan in exchange for about $375 garnished out of my paycheck each month. This is about what we had to pay privately, but the college’s plan had better co-pays and coverage.

How do you get pref. rehire? Again, different from district to district, but usually you need about three years working as a part timer at a college, positive student evaluations, positive classroom observation reports, and a hell of a lot of paperwork signed in triplicate by the dean. Once you have it, going just one semester without being assigned a class can lose it for you, and require you to start at square one. Please keep in mind this is for part timers, not tenure for full time instructors.

Once you have it, you have to sign a lot of paperwork, including a yearly affidavit, to get your partial health insurance reimbursement. The reason for all the paperwork and the affidavit (which you pay to have notarized out of your own pocket) is to confirm that you are really married to who you say you are married to, and to be sure that no other college is giving you partial reimbursement.

What really frustrates me is that you have to fill all these forms out once each year. There’s a lot of them, too! They want every single piece of information about the person you are married to, and you both have to sign that affidavit. You have about a two week window, or you lose the insurance for the year. They are quite firm that no exceptions shall be made.

I also love that it is forbidden for us to get additional reimbursement from the other colleges we work at. I can see wanting to ensure you don’t get over 100%, but what’s wrong with someone working a full load between two different colleges getting 50% from each? Why can’t I have full health insurance? I’m certainly working full time, just between two (often three) different colleges. My training and credentials are identical to the other full time faculty. My hours are the same, if not worse. Screw it, they are worse.

Recently, my district cut their reimbursement for part-time faculty. Yay. Here’s a post to our faculty listserv, reprinted with permission, from an ajunct colleague who would like to be known as Professor Rant:

I also assume that there will be no way to offset the cost of 
insurance for those of us who work elsewhere. Next summer, part-timers 
will receive an affidavit from Human Resources WITH WORDING IN CAPITAL 
LETTERS threatening what will happen if we don’t comply, which we will 
have to have notarized at our own expense, stating that we are not 
receiving insurance elsewhere. We can’t pay half at two schools, for 
example, to get full benefits.



We will also not be able to count summer classes towards our health 
insurance. If we only have three during the school year, for example, 
picking up a summer class will not change anything and we will lose 
insurance entirely. I pursued this issue in several places and was 
told change was impossible.



An across the board pay cut, say 10%, if that is indeed coming, will 
not be fair either to part-timers for the same reason the sales tax is 
not fair but is called regressive. We exist at a lower income level, 
so any reduction will cut into our ability to meet basic needs, as 
opposed to cutting into what I think economics calls wealth, available 
money to buy luxury items, invest, etc. California offsets this 
disparity by not charging income tax on food.



We still are paid less, but the 75 or whatever percent doesn’t tell 
the whole story. We still have significantly fewer step increases for 
our years of experience. We have no other benefits, nor the advantages 
of a sabbatical. There are hidden losses as well. Some of us have to 
rent instead of put equity in a home, and we have less money to invest 
and watch grow. Nor do we get help with computer costs for school 
tasks that now are mandatory. There is more. . . .



The school is sitting on a mammoth debt it has never fully recognized 
or adequately sought to address. How many millions (tens of millions, 
hundreds?) has the school saved since its inception by relying on part- 
time work? If there weren’t a large and flexible pool of willing part- 
timers all these years, the school would have had to hire full-timers 
and made drastic changes in everything — salary, benefits, programs, 
class sizes, and anything else that comes under this allotment.



I do want to make a show of respect to FA and our representatives 
there, whose motives and integrity I do not question in the least. I 
have followed events from the sidelines for over twenty years, 
especially through a former member, and do have a sense — but only a 
sense — of how demanding and tedious and frustrating their work is, 
this largely because of the inflexibility and blindness of the 
district. I also realize that without the work of some, things would 
be much worse.



The listserve, I realize, is not the right place to make these 
comments. But it is a place where I can speak. Also I need a place to 
exercise the critical demands of my profession. The changes may be 
inevitable, but only that. Please, let’s not call them necessary or 
fair or right in any other way. Let us call a pile of manure for what 
it is: a pile of manure.



But let us see if we can make the pile smaller.



And please, let’s not remain silent, allowing someone else the chance 
to think all is right and good. Please rant where ranting is in order. 
Also, bottling our frustration up is unhealthy.



In my state 75% of all college instructors are adjunct. What do you think this sort of treatment does to our morale, our work effort, our happiness and productivity?

You see, one of the colleges I teach at…let’s just call them Looney College…decided to mail my paycheck to the wrong address.  This is apparently both my problem and my fault, according to payroll.

My paycheck was mailed to my old apartment, and I have been trying for the last three weeks to get payroll to reissue the check to me.  Payroll has been 100% uncooperative.  I initially left voicemails which were never returned.  When I finally got  a hold of a human being (and I do use the term lightly) in payroll, she was very vocal about blaming me for the situation.  She refused to begin the process of canceling the old check and issuing a new one, and she spent most of the conversation complaining about how many of us fail to keep our information up to date.

I told her that I did keep my information up to date, that usually paychecks are direct deposited, and that my move coincided with the mailing of this particular check.  It’s not an issue of blame, I told her, the check ended up at the wrong address and you need to cancel out the check before someone cashes it and issue me a new one.

She said that what I was asking was a lot of paperwork, and that she’d contact me in a week with instructions about how to begin the process.  The week passed with no contact, and so I called her again.  When I finally got a hold of her, she said they would not be reissuing any checks anytime soon, and I’d just have to wait.  I told her that I’d already been waiting 3 weeks,  and that I had bills to pay.  She said it was my own fault for not updating my address, and that since it wasn’t her fault she wasn’t going to do anything about it anytime soon.  She said she’d be in touch with me but gave no date when she’d call me back (something she has never yet done) and no date as to when I could expect my missing paycheck.

Also, in checking the online paystub, I see that I was only paid for 8 of the 11 units I am currently teaching at the college.

So I am beginning the process of seeing if that mighty teacher’s union that non-teachers are always complaining about can actually do anything to help me, seeing as payroll more or less hung up on me.

Isn’t this sort of shenanigans illegal?  If someone is owed money, then isn’t it really important they…you know…get paid?

I feel so powerless and humiliated.

I know I am a college instructor, and not high school teacher, but I
thought I’d share his little diatribe anyway because it does spark some very
interesting points relating to my profession.

Please keep in mind the Maher is a comedian first, and political commentator
second, and also that this contains a little rough language.

New Rule: Let’s Not Fire the Teachers When Students Don’t Learn — Let’s Fire the Parents

-Bill Maher

New Rule: Let’s not fire the teachers when students don’t learn – let’s fire the parents. Last week President Obama defended the firing of every single teacher in a struggling high school in a poor Rhode Island neighborhood. And the kids were outraged. They said, “Why blame our teachers?” and “Who’s President Obama?” I think it was Whitney Houston who said, “I believe that children are our future – teach them well and let them lead the way.” And that’s the last sound piece of educational advice this country has gotten – from a crack head in the ’80′s.

Yes, America has found its new boogeyman to blame for our crumbling educational system. It’s just too easy to blame the teachers, what with their cushy teachers’ lounges, their fat-cat salaries, and their absolute authority in deciding who gets a hall pass. We all remember high school – canning the entire faculty is a nationwide revenge fantasy. Take that, Mrs. Crabtree! And guess what? We’re chewing gum and no, we didn’t bring enough for everybody.

But isn’t it convenient that once again it turns out that the problem isn’t us, and the fix is something that doesn’t require us to change our behavior or spend any money. It’s so simple: Fire the bad teachers, hire good ones from some undisclosed location, and hey, while we’re at it let’s cut taxes more. It’s the kind of comprehensive educational solution that could only come from a completely ignorant people.

Firing all the teachers may feel good – we’re Americans, kicking people when they’re down is what we do – but it’s not really their fault. Now, undeniably, there are some bad teachers out there. They don’t know the material, they don’t make things interesting, they have sex with the same kid every day instead of spreading the love around… But every school has crappy teachers. Yale has crappy teachers – they must, they gave us George Bush.

According to all the studies, it doesn’t matter what teachers do. Although everyone appreciates foreplay. What matters is what parents do. The number one predictor of a child’s academic success is parental involvement. It doesn’t even matter if your kid goes to private or public school. So save the twenty grand a year and treat yourself to a nice vacation away from the little bastards.

It’s also been proven that just having books in the house makes a huge difference in a child’s development. If your home is adorned with nothing but Hummel dolls, DVD’s, and bleeding Jesuses, congratulations, you’ve just given your children the gift of Duh. Sarah Palin said recently she wrote on her hand because her father used to do it. I rest my case.

When there are no books in the house, and there are no parents in the house, you know who raises the kids? That’s right, the television. Kids aren’t keeping up with their studies; they’re keeping up with the Kardashians. We’re allowing the television, as babysitter, to turn us into a nation of slutty idiots. By the way, one sign your 9-year-old may be watching too much One Tree Hill: if she has an imaginary friend with benefits.

Numerous organizations will be using this rally as a model to spark action in other cities and states.

“An Energizing Rally For Social Security Fairness For Teachers”

You’ll be entertained and informed.

Sat. May 30, 11:00am – 12:30pm. Location: Berkeley Community Theater at Berkeley High School, 1930 Allston Way, Berkeley.

Parking: Allston Garage, one block east of school, $5

BART: One block south, one block west of downtown Berkeley Station

This is a One-Time Shot!

Two bills have recently been presented to our legislators. These bills, if passed, would repeal two unjust laws (the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset) that have financially disadvantaged teachers for decades.

These two unfair laws dictate that teachers who worked in the public sector prior to teaching, or during teaching, may not collect full Social Security benefits at levels that other contributors do, even when they paid the same amounts as others into the Social Security System. Furthermore, teachers may not collect Social Security benefits, at the same amounts as others, from deceased spouses, or collect full Social Security benefits that they earned as a dependent spouse.

President Obama stated he would approve the new legislation if it reaches his desk. So the time is right to act on this.

Most of the public, unfortunately, is not aware of this injustice facing teachers. In fact, many teachers are not even aware of it until they retire. While they receive Social Security statements each year stating what they will receive upon retirement, it is only later that
they learn the statements don’t apply to them because they are teachers in CA. And many, who became teachers later in life, were not told ahead of time that they would forfeit Social Security benefits when they became teachers.

This is it! We are so close — but we need you to show up and be counted! We have the press. We have a beautiful theater that holds 3,500 people. If everyone who came to our first rally brings five other people, we’ll fill the theater! Plus — You’ll have a great time and get informed!

Janet Roosevelt, niece of FDR and Eleanor will speak.

Steve De Peu, CTA retirement committee advisor, will inform you on the impact of the GPO and WEP and what NEA is doing to help repeal this legislation.

Mark Sternberger, NEA Board of Directors, will provide us with more information.

Gail Mendes, Secretary/Treasurer of CTA will also honor us with her presence.

You will be entertained by a fabulous band — The Angry Tired Teachers! They write their own lyrics and will tailor their songs to our cause. They will energize you, and make you smile.

For more information about the rally, or for more information regarding Social Security fairness, visit our website: www.socialsecurityfairness.com

A key element in the story is that the Brownie’s fathers lived through segregation. So when we began discussing the fathers, and the concept of racial and social inheritance, I asked the question, “What did their fathers live through?”

Blank stares.

“Alright,” I said, “if this story takes place in the eighties, and these girls are about ten or eleven years old, then what was happening in this nation when their parents were their age?”

More stares. One student put his head down.

“Come on, people!” I clapped my hands to try and wake them up. “What was going on in this country in the late fifties and mid-sixties? What did all their fathers, all African-Americans for that matter, live through?”

“Slavery?” a particularly dull students asked.

Words failed me.

Slavery? Slavery!

“In 1960?” I asked her.

“All black people were slaves,” she told me cautiously.

“In 1960?” I asked again, incredulously. “When did slavery end? For God’s sake, when was the civil war?”

“The war was in the thirties,” another voice mumbled. “So that’s…was it 1938?”

You heard it here first: Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in 1938. Or possibly 1960. At this point, the student who had guessed slavery existed in 1960, placed her head down on her desk, and closed her eyes.