Never Rains but It Pours…

damNAtion! Is this EVER going to stop????

So, having been rescued from a potentially bottomless fiasco, come yesterday afternoon I’m sitting here staring into the computer, trying to decide whether to start on the client’s latest barrage of chapters, whether to try to figure out what my own character is going to say next, whether to give up and just cruise the Web for awhile, or what…when the phone rings.

It’s the brand new English Division chair. “We have a problem with your online course,” says he.

“Which one?” I ask. I figure the 235 section hasn’t made and he’s calling to say he’s canceling it.

“The 101.”

“I don’t have a 101 section,” I say.

“I mean the 102 class. A student called…”

…Ohhh SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I think…

“…and said she couldn’t figure out why your assignments don’t jibe with the textbook. We realized your syllabus was written for the 10th edition. But they’ve bought the 11th edition.”

“WHAT?”

“Yes, we’re using the 11th edition. The admin says she gave you a copy.”

“No. I never got a copy of the 11th edition. I had no idea.”

The mailboxes in the departmental mailroom (needless to say, adjuncts do not have offices or even a corner of a desk in a bullpen) are set up so it’s hard to tell whether your name refers to the slot above it or to the slot below it. People often take mail for the wrong person, and so probably what’s happened is some other adjunct took the book out of my slot, months ago, and since of course I rarely go out to the campus, I had no clue. Chances are I wouldn’t have had a clue anyway, but I might have noticed a new text sitting in someone else’s mailbox.

I would know if a new text had been foisted on me, because every time that happens — which is about every two or three years with the damn Seyler book — I fly into a soaring rage. It invariably means I have to COMPLETELY rewrite my syllabus, a time-consuming, hair-tearing nuisance. Seyler doesn’t just throw in some new “selected readings.” She jacks the entire textbook’s organization around, so you’re forced to re-do everything.

The constant churning-out of new textbook editions has to do with the used-book industry, which exists solely because textbook publishers, seeing a captive audience, gouge students ridiculous amounts of money for their products. Seyler’s Read, Reason, Write is a prime example. At the high end, the thing is worth about $30, new. But as we scribble, Amazon is selling the damn thing for $116.84. Or you can rent it for a mere $87.99.

When a book is sold and re-purchased in the used-book market, the publisher earns nothing on the resale and the author earns no royalty. Since profits and royalties on a required textbook that costs $120 are significant (especially when it’s written for an almost universally required course like freshman comp), naturally publishers and their authors resent this commerce. To get around it, they cobble together new editions every two or three years.

So in the first year after publication, they make a bundle. Second year, they make a little less. By the third year, they’re going broke, as they DESERVE to be doing given the way they rip off the students.

At any rate, what this means on the microcosm is that the instant I regain consciousness from today’s fucking medical misadventure (as my friend Harriet pointed out, even though the doctor probably did what she was supposed to do in following the new DCIS excision guidelines, nevertheless the result is an unnecessary second surgery for me), I’m going to have to spend the better part of a day rewriting the syllabus. Actually, it won’t be the instant: the department is snail-mailing the book to me, so presumably it will arrive toward the end of the week. That will blow away my weekend.

Meanwhile, though, it develops that SOME of the classmates have the 10th edition! They presumably read the syllabus and also happen to order their books online instead of at the rapacious campus bookstore. So, students who a) were sharp enough to read the syllabus closely up-front and b) are smart enough to figure out that you can get these things a lot cheaper at Amazon and waypoints ended up with a textbook that works with the syllabus. Students who, as students are wont to do, simply went into the campus bookstore and purchased all their texts in one swell foop have the 11th edition.

I’m reluctant to make students who had their act together at the outset go out and buy an outrageously overpriced new text. If I’m to resist this shearing of my little flock, I’m going to have to create an adjusted syllabus for the people who have the 11th edition and let the ones who have the 10th edition use the existing syllabus.

Just imagine the grading nightmare that’s going to create.

I could deep-six the reading reports — that would get rid of 11 busywork assignments for them to have to write and us to have to read. But then I have no source of steady interaction in what is a 100% online course! So that’s not going to work.

There are only so many things you can say about how to write a freshman comp essay. And so really, there’s no good reason for them to buy the 11th edition (except that we as faculty are required to make them do so, by way of enriching the bookstore and the publisher).

[And, to make everything perfect, after I paid Luz $80 to make my floors glow in the dark yesterday, the dogs just frolicked through the mud and ran into the houses. Doesn’t matter: When my son comes to babysit me, he;s bringing Charley, whose snowshoe-sized feet will track in three times as much mud.]

So what I’m leaning toward is to keep the present 11 busywork projects (the so-called “reading responses,” which ask students to synopsize a chapter and then apply the chapter’s principles to one of the chapter’s selected readings) for those who already have the 10th edition and to create 11 new busywork projects for those who bought the 11th edition. The projects are essentially the same: synopsize the content/show how it works. It probably doesn’t MATTER what the chapter number is and what new reading selections Seyler has substituted for the old ones.

Except for the enormous hassle of trying to figure out which chapters in the new edition correspond to the chapters in the 10th edition, it may not be that difficult to simply let them write their “reading responses” on 11 chapters, any 11 chapters. It WILL be a hassle: this bitch of an author revises chapters by moving contents from Chapter A to Chapter B, so you end up with a new text whose chapters don’t correspond reliably with the old text’s. It will be a confusing, time-consuming, INFURIATING headache. But once that’s out of the way, it shouldn’t be that hard to score the busywork.

Isn’t teaching “fulfilling”? Isn’t it “rewarding”?

PBPHBPBPBPBTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!