The Adjunct

“Why don’t you update your blog anymore?”

I was embarrassed just as much with the question as I was with the answer.

I had been so excited to get this site up and running, and then just when things were rolling I fell into a series of very unfortunate circumstances. I broke my foot and I broke my jaw, and as a result I broke my spirit for keeping most of the pleasures in my life in order. One of those pleasures was this blog.

I’ll give a much more detailed foot and mouth report later, but here is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to friend in which I describe what’s been going on these past two months. I think I capture my shattered hopes and dreams quite nicely.

My life has gone to absolute hell these last two weeks.

I haven’t even been able to stay on top of my emails. It’s a wonder I am still employed.

My foot is in a cast, and I have to go everywhere on crutches. This means I can go NOWHERE; you can’t get far on crutches. At work, I can’t even get from my classroom to the mailroom because it is too fucking far. They won’t offer any assistance for me (the disability resource center is for STUDENTS, and I am not a students). I get no paid time off. I have 7 more weeks of this.

I spend all my time at home in bed or in the reclining chair. Getting to the bathroom is hard. At night, my upstairs neighbor blasts us with endless thumping music from 11:00pm -6:00am. I feel like I am in a coffin.

And then there’s the bad part.

The bad part is that something is horribly wrong with my jaw. It has been hurting for months now, getting worse, and worse. I can barely eat, because it is so painful to chew. Yesterday I ate only soup all day. I went to the doctor, and they said to go to the dentist. I went to the dentist and he had no idea what was wrong with me; he pulled a tooth out of my mouth but it didn’t work. It is not going away and is freaking me out.

The closest anyone has come to a diagnosis is this bullshit umbrella term called TMJ, which basically just means “extreme jaw pain the won’t go away.” They treat it by putting you on musscle relaxers for the rest of your life. Jaw hurting today? Take this pill. That’s about it. No cure, just one of those things we don’t understand. I’ll spend the rest of my life like this. I’ll never be able to eat a hardroll sandwich again.

I am not doing well.

Suffice it to say, my enthusiasm for web logging did not sustain itself. I could barely keep on top of my grading, let alone the other aspects of my life.

However, I do not offer this up as excuse, but a humble explanation to the questiom, “Why no updates?”

I plan to rectify the situation. Although my foot is still in a cast, my jaw still in pain, and my upstairs neighbor still a tremendous douchebag, my spirit has slowly returned. As you can see from the last two posts, this current one, and the posts to come: I’m back, baby!

I also realize that the saddest thing on the entire internet is a dead blog whose final post reads: I’m back, and the blogging shall continue. I wrote several days of posts in advance, to be published at a healthy rate, as an insurance policy against that happening to me.

Here we go again!

After reflecting upon my last post, I did not feel entirely satisfied with it being placed under the category of The sad, secret lives of adjuncts.

True, dealing with difficult students can be frustrating at times, but yesterday’s incident did not really depress me (unless I started considering these students as the future of humanity, in which case yes).

As I continued to think about this, numerous other incidents involving jaw-droppingly thick students came rushing to mind. In light of my recent blogger’s block, I decided to encourage all forms of professorial diatribes by adding a new category: Zombie Students Need Brains.

Oh, Professorial Diatribes might be another good one!

Off we go!

Today, a student showed up to my class with a scantron.

She wanted to know how long the test was.

I told her there was no test today, or any day, because it was a composition class (essays and discussion only). We’re about halfway through the semester at this point.

She insisted that I had instructed them to bring scantrons for the test. I told her I didn’t even know how the fucking scantron machine works, and that if she can find the word scantron anywhere in my syllabus, or calendar, or handouts then I will let her leave the class with an instant A.

She sifted through her crumpled handouts for about ten minutes.

Then two of her friends came into class and pulled out their scantrons. Apparently she had been reminded them about the test today…

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

I hate these things!

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

Brainstorm! Oh, I just had a brainstorm!

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

No more private lessons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We learn through trail and error.

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

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

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

Baby ‘customizing’ advances claimed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I don’t buy it.

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

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

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

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.