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 reminded them about the test today…

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.

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…

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.

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.

Fish states that, “Universities … do not hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” After paying momentary lip service to the reality that no one specifically is to blame for the rise of adjunct instructors, Fish then spends the rest of the article blaming adjunct instructors, even going so far as to say that we adjuncts represent a lack of values for “higher learning.”

Yes, we are the cheapest teachers, in that we get paid dramatically less than our tenured colleagues. But I resent greatly that Fish compares adjuncts everywhere to shameful schools like the University of Phoenix, simply because he sees most colleges and universities are now basically “for profit” organizations. Invoking the University of Phoenix to win an argument about academia is as fucked a fallacy as invoking Nazis to win…well, just about any other argument.

I work as an adjunct English instructor at several community colleges. Like most other part-timers, I do this full-time, meaning I drive between 3-4 different districts in order to cobble together a living. The reason I have to do this is that in addition to getting paid about 30% less per hour for doing the exact same work as my tenured colleagues, I also am restricted from teaching more than 1-2 classes per semester in each district. So in order to get a full workload of classes, I need to be on the books at several different districts. This is no easy task, because most districts are not hiring, thanks to constant budget cuts by our state’s governor. Even when I do manage to get hired to teach one class in one district, I have no guarantee whatsoever that I will ever again be offered a class, and thus every four months or so (depending on whether the district I teach at is semester-based or quarter-based) I have to reapply for my own job. Needless to say, I get no benefits whatsoever: if I am sick, I have to pay out of my pocket for my healthcare, and if being sick caused me to miss work then I get docked pay. I haven’t been to a dentist in 2 years.

Yet what Fish fails to observe is that most adjuncts have the exact same qualifications as our full-time colleagues. None of us, tenured or adjunct, are in this “business” for the money. Despite a society, which sneers “those who can’t do, teach,” even in this economy we could all find better paying work somewhere.

So why do we do it? I’ve talked to a lot of professors, and believe it or not, even the most dispirited, tired, beaten down of them still expresses a desire to make a positive difference in the lives of their students. They don’t all feel that they succeed, but they all understand the value of education and that their role as teacher is critical, in fact, the most critical component, beyond even the students themselves.

So what is the difference between adjuncts and the tenured? It isn’t our degrees, and it isn’t our experience. It isn’t our training, and it isn’t our capabilities. Adjuncts are not instructors who have repeatedly applied for full-time work and been rejected due to lack of a higher degree, lack of experience, or lack of capability.

Adjuncts are adjuncts, and not tenured, because there are no tenured positions available. In all the districts that I teach, only about 30% of the instructors are full-time, leaving everyone else to be an adjunct. Before our recent budget crisis, most schools would hire one new full-time professor per year.

That position would receive literally hundreds of applications, all from highly qualified adjuncts, many of who have worked at the very school in question for years (if not decades). Who gets the position? It’s a crapshoot. To be picked as the one person for a full-time job out of five hundred applicants is just a matter of luck. Sometimes it goes to the part-timer with the most seniority, other times to a fresh, young thirty-nine year old teacher who has just received their doctorate. To imply that something was inferior about all those other applicants is both ignorant and disrespectful.

Now we have a budget crisis, funding to state colleges has been slashed again, and all schools in the state have a hiring freeze, meaning they have gone from having one open full-time position to having zero.
Fish concludes by saying he was born at just right time, and that were he born today then he’d not be able to receive the quality education that he got in the good old days (you know, when women weren’t allowed to be doctors, and the entire student body was nice and white and clean). According to his website, “Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University. He is the author of 10 books. His new book on higher education, “Save the World On Your Own Time,” has just been published.”

Congratulations, Dean Fish. It sounds like you were born at just the right time after all. No, not the right time to receive a proper higher education as you conclude in your New York Times op-ed, but at just the right time to still get hired as a full-time employee in academia. In the old days, universities were hiring, and my wife and I would have been able to get full-time work. After all, we’re both highly qualified, and committed teachers. Today, that fact is irrelevant.

Yes, Dean Fish, if you were born when I was, things would have been different. Oh, the quality of your education would have been the same, if not better, despite what you might think about all us adjuncts teaching most of the classes. The difference would have come after you got that great education, because you would have found yourself in a position just like mine. You see, there just aren’t any full-time positions available anymore, and so you would have been forced, despite your top education and desire to teach, to work as a part-time instructor, just like the rest of us.

How long do you think you could have handled it? Something tells me you would have quit within a week and enrolled at business school.

The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success was written by, Richard E. Lyons, Marcella L Kysilka, and George E. Pawlas. According to the book, Lyons is a doctoral-holding dean, while Kysilka and Pawlas are both tenured. These are hardly part-time employees. Rather, the authors of The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success were in fact the bosses of said adjuncts. This wasn’t a book so much about living the difficult life of a part-time college instructor. It was a book written by your tenured bosses telling you how they’d prefer you did your job.

It’s very difficult being an adjunct. You have the same qualifications as a full-timer, and you do the exact same job as a full-timer, but for significantly less money. You receive no benefits such as healthcare, no time off, and often not even any sick days. In order to pay the rent and keep the electricity turned on you have to work at 3-4 districts, because each will only let you teach a few classes a year. To top it all off you have to reapply for your job every three months or so, and there’s always an overwhelming chance that you’ll end up without a class to teach.

To me, a bunch of tenured deans spelling out success for adjunct instructors is reminiscent of when President Reagan sat down with a group of unemployed Michigan auto workers, and tried to offer them some advice about how to find work in a struggling economy.

Okay, fine, DISCLAIMER: Yes, I know The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success was written for non-teaching professionals who find themselves in front of a classroom. It was not really intended for the likes of me, a professional instructor who had two years of teacher training in the rhet/comp program at the University of Arizona. It was intended more for the lawyer, doctor or business executives who finds themselves offered a class at the local community college. Kudos, I suppose, to the authors for putting together a kind of Dummies Guide to Teaching for the successful shmuck, although I am not sure if someone who is so clueless as to need a Dummies Guide should be put in a college classroom and entrusted with the educational responsibility of thirty or so students.

Shouldn’t our teachers, even the ones plucked out of the business world, be better than that? I’ll never forget the time I attended a departmental meeting and overheard one tenured professor ask another “What exactly is a C? What is that? Eighty percent? Fifty? I don’t know.” It’s a wonder I am not currently in prison, because I was overwhelmed with an impulse to beat this Professor senseless with her own exams, all the while screaming, “How the fuck can you be tenured and not know what constitutes a passing score in your own classroom?”

Obviously, I take teaching very seriously.

In spite of all this, teaching has got to be one of the most important jobs in our society. I truly believe that nearly every problem, from the economy to global warming, can be solved (or at least improved upon greatly) simply by a better-educated populace. Even if you disagree with me (it is, admittedly, a very sweeping statement), you must concede that education holds extreme importance to our well being and advancement, and thus whoever is at the wheel (i.e. the teacher) had better fucking know what they’re doing.

But it’s hard to get people who know what they’re doing, or care, when you have conditions like the ones I listed above. Often, as the insulting adage goes, those who can’t do, teach, and that’s just one reason why I am hard on The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success, because it is just encouraging more and more people who lack the most basic of concepts of teaching to pick up a piece of chalk.

So I decided to write my own thoughts about being an adjunct instructor. I don’t have the qualifications of Lyons, Kysilka, and Pawlas, and that’s exactly what makes me qualified to talk about life as a part-timer.