The Adjunct

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.

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.

Two of the headlines on CNN today demonstrated the great economic dissonance that is more and more prevalent in our country.

The first headline:

Top Republican unloads his mansions

Then, directly below it:

“Make every penny count, and count every penny.”

Compare the two articles, each dealing with the same economy. From the first article:

(CNN) — He has been estimated to be worth in excess of $250 million, but former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney may just be belt-tightening along with the majority of Americans.

Romney, the former business whiz and governor of Massachusetts, is looking to unload two of his four mansions, collectively valued in the currently-sour real estate market at close to $10 million.

Compare to this excerpt from the second:

(CNN) —Orman: If you don’t have a good savings rate and something happens, where are you going to go?

That’s when you all of a sudden start putting things on your credit cards — that you can’t do anymore.

That’s when you then start to become an aid, you know, where you’re asking the state to aid you — food stamps and everything.

What should strike you about this is the great disconnect between the two. This is not meant as any form of attack on Romney, nor Republicans. Democrats in Washington are millionaires as well, and even if President Obama only owns one home, his bank account is quite full, just like nearly all our leaders.

No, this isn’t about politics, but it is about a tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements: the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

As Orman tells people to pinch every penny, Romney unloaded a few of his spare mansions. As one talks about people going on food stamps, the other pulls in 20 million in spare change.

How can one world possibly understand the other?

Yet it is those penny-people who decide which multi-millionaire shall lead them, in both business and politics. And those chosen multi-millionaires shall try and see what they can do to make things right for the penny-people. It reminds me of one of those conversations where both people are talking to each other about completely different things, yet neither notices.

Fellow adjunct instructor and all around woman of letters Stephanie Han has written about her reaction after reading Naomi Wolf‘s book, Misconceptions:

While she made a few good points, overall, she sounded so out of touch with the average working woman I wanted to throw the book out the window when I read it. The woe-is-me-and-my-group-of-friends-we-all-own-expensive-homes-and-are-lonely was insulting. Hers was not a perfect world but she didn’t seem to get that she had a much better situation than the burger slinging working person.

At the end of Orman’s interview, Larry King helped demonstrate the point I am trying to make by chipping in with his own ideas on what these penny people can do to stay afloat in these tough times.

King: Go cheap. Tip 15 percent, that’s it. Shop — bargain everything. … If tomatoes are 20 cents over there and 15 cents across the street, buy for 15 cents.

That’s right, the problem the penny people are having is that they must be tipping too high! Please, cut off those tips at 15% for your own good. Buy 15 cent tomatoes, because you’re gonna need every nickel.

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.

While this is a little (okay, a lot) of a jeer against Bush, I hope you will also view this as a cheer for academics. The former President liked to deflect criticism by saying that history shall be the only judgement that matters. Well, the historians have made a statement, and it is not in Bush’s favor.

From CNN

(CNN) – Former President Bush has only been out of office for less than a month, but historians have already delivered an early verdict on his presidency.

In a survey of over 60 historians conducted by C-SPAN, the 43rd president ranks the seventh worst (and 36th overall) in the nation’s history, just edging out Millard Fillmore.

That’s pretty harsh. Fillmore is ridiculously unfunny, as seen below.

Oh, Millard Fillmore. He was the last member of the Whig Party, wasn’t he? Good for him! Fuck Andrew Jackson, right?

Continuing…

At the top of the list, the historians rank Abraham Lincoln as the best president in the nation’s history, edging out George Washington and Franklin Roosevelt.

If only we could have a President who followed the writings of Abraham Lincoln, and tried to save our nation with policies modeled after Franklin Roosevelt’s.

Oh, wait.

I get it now.

The duck’s name is Mallard Fillmore, not Millard, and he’s a Republican.

Happy President’s Day!