Coffee heat rising

Teaching

A Quarter of the Semester Already GONE!

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ha Haaa! One week into a four-week section, and a quarter of the course is already past!

The li’l stoonts have turned in five papers — really just little reports on assigned chapters, designed to force them to actually read the stuff. They’ve been to the library and listened to the librarian lecture on how to find resources for their papers. A few of them have come up with viable topics for their papers, the first of which is due in a week.

This. is. GREAT.

I fail to understand why most of these de rigueur hoop-jump courses are not taught in extremely short format like this. Obviously, an intense format would be too much for some students — though it must be noted that several of the current classmates are alumni of remedial reading and writing courses. So if we must have these courses, they should be offered in 16-week sections for those who aren’t so fluent at reading and writing. And 8-week sections would probably do for those who feel  less confident but still are reasonably competent — I mean, we’re only talking about three papers here! For those who are good writers and reasonably well organized students, four weeks should more than suffice. That’s one week per short paper and two weeks for the 2,500-word term papers.

Since as a practical matter most students put off writing any paper until the last minute, those periods are probably as much time as any student in a 16-week course would devote to the assignments.

At any rate, from my point of view, teaching a four-week course makes the pay almost reasonable: $2400 for a month of part-time work. The class meets two hours, four days a week. Although I have grading every night, except for the three District-required essays, it’s pro-forma: just glance at their papers, see if they’ve actually done the assignment; if so slap 15 points on it; if not, downgrade accordingly, with as little comment as possible. It leaves the rest of the summer for me to do my thing, and it also leaves about half of every day for the purpose.

And so, to work…to read these exercises in front of Netflix. 😉

Employer Beware: Here come our students!

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Holy mackerel.

I gave a student a gentleman’s B on an extended definition assignment — an 80 when in fact the paper was worth at best about 75 points and in fact was eligible to have 100 points deducted, leaving the poor lad with a goose-egg.

But because it’s an online course — they do have difficulty learning this stuff on their own, without someone to draw pictures on the whiteboard and explain it over and over in every iteration the instructor can think of — I’m giving this bunch the benefit of the doubt. This has been especially so for the extended definition, which is a difficult genre even for upper-division students to get their minds around, and for MLA style, to which many of them have never been exposed in their entire lives.

So a day or two after I ship this thing off to the little twit, feeling some misgivings about the generosity of the score, he e-mails me back to complain and ask what on EARTH he did wrong, since he carefully followed the MLA style guidelines shown at Purdue (no, he didn’t) and he didn’t think the paper was unfocused, as accused.

Argh.

I just finished explaining all this to the kid, in writing. To do so entails writing MORE copy than the student had to write for the assignment itself!

Original comment, tossed off quickly but IMHO right on target:

Okay, first off you’ll need to learn how to cite a source using MLA style. Please read the chapters assigned in the textbook on this subject. If you haven’t bought the textbook or it doesn’t help, then an excellent site to learn these techniques and to see examples is the Purdue OWL. It has an entire section explaining MLA style: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

Second, it is best to avoid the dictionary definition. With your essay, I can see why it would be useful to give comparative definitions, but it’s best to find a different way than relying on the dictionary.

And third, your body paragraphs do not tell a cohesive story. In some ways you showed what those for and against gay marriage believe. A more interesting and effective approach may have been to define gay marriage in terms of its legal, fiscal, and religious implications. It appears you have sources for this. This way your essay would be less of a “debatable” topic and more presenting some important facets of this definition.

New comments…

[Student opens essay with two insipid dictionary definitions, knocked off (one without quote marks) from Merriam-Webster Online. The subject matter is same-sex marriage, an insipid topic much favored by high-school teachers and English 101 instructors, and so the paper is probably recycled for this assignment.]

This is a direct, word-for-word quote. Even when you give the source, you STILL have to put quotation marks around strings of words that are directly quoted from the source: Marriage: “the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law.”   In writing an extended definition, it’s best to avoid using a dictionary definition, but if one feels one must, one at least ought not to start out with it.   

I’d make a new paragraph here, since you’re switching subjects a bit.

Also, it is best to avoid starting with the dictionary definition.

[Student comes to the end of the introductory paragraph with no sign of a thesis statement anywhere in sight.]

Okay. Now let’s think about where we are at the end of this opening paragraph. We’ve set up a kind of contrast between two dictionary definitions (one of heterosexual and one of same-sex marriage) and we’ve said that some people resent the idea of same-sex marriage as an affront to what they believe are the moral values of the United States. But – and here’s the big but – we haven’t established our own definition of anything.

As it stands, the thesis statement says that some people are offended at the idea of same-sex marriage, and that might work for  a report on the state of moralistic huffiness about this issue. However, the point of an extended definition is to present your own interpretation of what something means, an interpretation that goes beyond a mere dictionary definition. Thus, an extended definition’s thesis statement should put your definition (i.e., your interpretation, your personal spin, or your insight) in a nutshell.

One could have any number of definitions of marriage. For example, you could define it as solely a legal arrangement and argue that in a country of laws, that is all it is and the government has no business imposing religious definitions of marriage on those who do not subscribe to a specific religion – the U.S., after all, is not a theocracy. You could go the other way around and argue that marriage is more than a lowly human legal contract but instead has spiritual implications that go far beyond legalities, and so it should be a special case. 

In either event (or in any other event you can dream up), your interpretation needs to appear up-front, and it needs to drive the rest of the paper’s argument. In other words, your interpretation drives the point you want to make, and so it is the thesis statement, or at least a crucial part of the thesis.

[Student inserts an in-text citation: (Peter Sprigg, 2012).]

So what we want to do here is use only the author’s last name in the in-text citation; if there’s more than one author we’d use their last names up to a point…I think in MLA style it’s six, but look it up; after six, use the lead author’s last name followed by et al.: (Sprigg, 2012); (Sprigg and Twigg, 2012); (Sprigg, Twigg, and Busch, 2012; Sprigg et al., 2012).

[Student writes, “Mr. Sprigg claims that…”]

In academic writing, just use the person’s last name for this context; no Mr. is needed.

[Student regurgitates Sprigg’s reasons for opposing same-sex marriage, one of which is mildly specious and three of which are downright silly.]

Okay, it’s all very nice that Sprigg makes these claims, but how is it related to the definition of straight or gay marriage? And why should we buy these claims, which on their face are pretty silly? The Social Security issue could be a valid concern; the others, not so much, since people who are unhappy in marriages usually leave, whether or not they can settle down in wedded bliss with their same-sex partners; same-sex partners regularly adopt or obtain custody of children and raise them, and the fact that those partners’ relationship is legally recognized is unlikely to change that. So…what do Sprigg’s points have to do with anything? Especially with how marriage (straight or gay or both) is defined?

[Student rehashes the arguments of someone taking the pro-gay marriage stance; in doing so he mentions the claim that legalizing gay marriage is an attack on the institution of marriage itself.]

Ah hah! Here’s something we could use as a thesis for an extended definition. We could make the claim that the institution of marriage itself has a specific set of criteria that exclude same-sex unions. Note, though, that making that claim, while it would give us a definition to work with in this essay, would not of itself lead to the conclusion that legalizing same-sex unions and calling them “marriage” will result in the end of civilization as we know it. To do that, we would have to define marriage as the basis of and the bulwark of the entire moral and ethical construct of Western culture. That could be done…but to do so, we would have to say it in so many words.

[Student brings up recent cases in Arizona and New Mexico.]

Okay, we’ve got some good research here. But for the paper per se, we’re still in a kind of debate mode: yea or nay on gay marriage. We haven’t come up with an original point of view on marriage in general, on heterosexual unions, or on gay unions; we’ve only stated that people have differing opinions about the legitimacy of same-sex marriage. Note, here, that you only need the authors’ last names. BTW, I seem to have had my brain stuck in APA style here; MLA style spells out “and” while APA style uses the ampersand.

[In a muddled concluding paragraph, Student brings up the issue of religious beliefs, says Americans are not required to buy into but are supposed to respect others’ religious beliefs, and ends by deciding marriage is not just a word; it’s about love.]

Yes. This is an important point. But don’t lose sight of the fact that the US Constitution not only guarantees that Americans can worship God in any way we choose, but also that we are not forced to worship God at all. The government makes no establishment of religion. And there’s an incontrovertible fact that can bring us around to a way to use extended definition to argue one way or the other on this point. Here it is: we could build a definition of marriage as either a religious arrangement or as a legal arrangement – in this country, it happens to be both. Because Americans have conflated those two issues – i.e., a member of the clergy can legally marry a couple, and the couple does not have to go to a justice of the peace to make that church-based, church-sanctified union legal – we end up with a loud, contentious, and unpleasant argument over who can live together in a de facto state of marriage.

If we defined marriage as solely a religious arrangement, then we could argue that churches should have some say over what legal rights a couple may have. Using this to claim same-sex marriage should be disallowed would be difficult, because some established main-line churches are tolerant of gay marriage (just a few months ago, I was present at a marriage between two men performed by clergy of my church…one of the oldest Episcopal churches in the state). But it could be done.

If we defined it as solely a legal arrangement, then we could argue that clerics have no say about who may or may not be married in someone else’s church or down at the county courthouse – that they may say who may or may not be regarded as married in their church, but they may not dictate what people who are not members of their religion believe or practice.

You can make these arguments, obviously…but the idea with an extended definition essay is to make the arguments based on how a term is defined. What is marriage? Is it a legal arrangement? Is it a church institution? Is it merely a social recognition of a long-term (hopefully a life-long) commitment between a man and a woman, or between any two people? Is it the consecration of a sexual union intended to produce and protect children (and not primarily for pleasure or love)? Is it the consecration of two people’s love for each other? Is it the legal recognition and framework of a financial and parenting contract between two adults? Whatever definition you select and develop, that is what drives the essay…it’s what forms the argument (the point) you want to make. That’s not what’s happening in this essay.

 [In his Works Cited, Student lists two essays from Gale’s Opposing Viewpoints in Context, a library database designed to make it easy for students to find sources espousing different arguments about commonly assigned subjects. He gets the documentation style wrong.]

Italicize names of websites, book titles, movie titles, TV series, and other “long” things; put short things such as articles, poems, and short stories in quotation marks. Did you find these in an electronic source? If so:

Kellard, James. “Gay Marriage Should Be Legal.” Gale Opposing Viewpoints in Context, 2012. Web. 1 April 2014.

 [Student cites a website sponsored by the Pew Research Organization. He gets that wrong, too.]

Use caps & lower-case for all titles. Note the format for dates used by MLA. Add whether this appeared in print or online; if it’s a Web source, add the date of access. Use hanging indent (in Word: Format > Paragraph > Special > hanging). Separate the names of two authors with “and.” Pew Research Center is the sponsor of the Fact Tank website, so that’s set up like this:

Lipka, Michael and David Masci. “Arizona Bill Sparks Debate about Religious Objections to Gay Marriage.” Fact Tank. Pew Research Center. 25 February 2014. Web. 1 April 2014.

 [Instructor reviews rubrics/score sheet, wondering if the paper was graded unfairly. She thinks not…]

I understand that these are headache-inducing, ditzy details – that’s why scholars hire people like me to edit their research for publication and to get the citation and documentation correct according to whatever style manual the publisher happens to use. The trick is, whichever style manual you end up using in your academic career or in the world of work (if you’re in business, the health sciences, the social sciences, or education, you’ll use APA style), pay excruciatingly close attention to these annoying details. What capitalization conventions does the manual use (APA uses sentence style for article titles and books but caps & lower-case for magazines and journals; MLA uses caps & lower-case for all titles)? Where do the standard elements like author, title of article, title of journal or website, date of publication, and date of access go? What parts of the thing are set in italic? Even though the details differ from style manual to style manual, the overall principles are the same.

The score on this paper actually is generous – I only marked down 5 points for incorrect use of MLA style, and because the paper is not really an extended definition, had I been feeling particularly dyspeptic I could have marked it down 100 points. (What a harpy!!!!)

Try to get that MLA style down. It’s a real PITA, but you can do it, given some patience and time.

Herein lies a problem: To explain this stuff face-to-face would have taken…what? 10 minutes? It probably wouldn’t have been necessary, because I would have gone over it all in the classroom, where I could draw pictures on the whiteboard, ask the students to figure out how sample citations should look, and give them an opportunity to bring up their own questions. This would have occupied an hour or two of class time.

It’s to my advantage not to have to diddle away my hours standing in front of a classroom, partly because the more hours I stand in front of a classroom, the lower my hourly wage works out to be. In fact, it can work out to less than minimum wage, depending on the amount of course prep and grading time I put in.

However, mounting an online course is time-intensive, and the time used to create it and put it online is unpaid, as a practical matter. It all has to be done before one goes on the payroll.

Thus, the more time I put in on grading, the lower my pay. That means I tend to compile succinct summary comments like the one shown at the top of this series of rants, especially for papers that are not failing. When a student with a “B” demands that I explain myself in detail, then my hourly rate goes down because I have to spend some unholy amount of time figuring out how to explain what the student should have learned on his own — assuming he is competent to learn on his own.

What we have here are students who probably are competent but — get this — have never been asked to write a research-based paper in their ENTIRE thirteen and a half years of education. The kid hasn’t a clue.

Most of them have never been asked to write an extended definition, either. It’s not a genre that’s commonly taught in high schools.

By and large, they do not understand why they should have to take freshman comp. They don’t understand why the skills that they should have learned over the prior thirteen-plus years have value in the real world, nor, for that matter, do they have any idea what skills they’re missing. Consequently, because they think their time is being wasted (and are oblivious to the amount of their instructor’s time they waste), they feel entitled to turn in papers that they’ve already submitted for other courses — often for high-school classes.

When an instructor decides, as I did this semester, not to force students to write on subjects of her or his choosing but to let them select their own essay topics, what they invariably will do is recycle old papers. Few to none will write a new, original paper that actually fits the assignment.

Yes, I could combat that by indeed deducting 100 points from a paper that does not fulfill the assignment — in this case, a paper that’s not really an extended definition but just a review of opposing viewpoints on a controversial subject. But…ever hear of Rate Your Professor?

I have a friend who was short-listed for a job at a much better university in a part of the country where she dearly wanted to live. After she didn’t get hired, she learned she was eliminated because a student had posted an anonymous and, IMHO, libelous review of her teaching practices at Rate Your Professor. Anyone who is not tenured — as adjuncts by definition are not — is crazy to fail a student for not turning in a paper that exactly matches the assignment.

People who are underpaid and whose job evaluation depends on anonymous popularity contests are put in a position of simply not being able to teach adequately. They are not able to deliver an honest assessment of a paper — or, if they do so, they do it at considerable risk.

I have given up the elaborate project of inventing original study topics and assigning specific paper themes that are difficult to self-plagiarize. It’s too much work; it takes way, way too many hours, leaving me earning less than minimum wage. Out of self-defense, our underpaid and overworked teachers, from K-12 all the way through the BA, are forced to let things go that should not get past them, to deliver substandard guidance, and to leave students pretty much in the dark.

 

School’s Out!

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Yay! Another class down — just filed grades for the ten magazine-writing students who survived to the end of the semester.

That’s the highest survival rate I’ve seen since I started teaching these online courses — ten of the original twenty made it all the way through eight long weeks. And that, interestingly is pretty good for a community college course, especially one that’s mounted online.

Why? I mean, why would so many last, not why do so many drop. Community college students have so many headaches, problems, and challenges that at any give time in their lives they have to make choices, and when they get overwhelmed one of the easiest choices is to drop a course. I attribute it to the change from Blackboard to the new Canvas online courseware. It is so much less bloated than Blackboard and so much easier to use, I expect students found it far less onerous to figure out and navigate.

Every bit as much less onerous than I did, as a matter of fact. Once the course materials were online, running the course was ridiculously easy. This was the first time I’ve felt that $2400 was fair pay for a Heavenly Gardens course.

Interestingly, too, the grade curve came out looking more normal. Usually at the end of the semester my magazine-writing students have either As and Bs or Fs, with little or nothing in between. This term I entered 2 As, 4 Bs, 3 Cs, and 1 D.  And that, I expect, can be attributed to the relatively high survival rate — in the past, only the most determined and competent students have made it to the end of the term. If these students hung in there because simply navigating the course was pretty simple, that would mean more C-level students would have lasted.

Next semester instead of asking them to get all the course ground rules by reading the syllabus — something many of them evidently can’t do — I’m going to add a video in which I go over all the high points and show them how to find the materials on-screen and also where to submit papers.

Astonishingly, Canvas didn’t go down once. Not a single glitch made it impossible for classmates to find course materials or file assignments. Based on past experience with Blackboard, which always crashes at the worst possible moment, I had asked them to e-mail papers to me. That, of course, is a hassle, for them as well as for me. Several classmates quickly figured out how to submit their papers through Canvas, making it extremely easy to access, grade, and return the stuff. So, next semester turning in papers on Canvas will be required.

The community college district sent out a notice that they’re cutting part-timers’ hours so as to avoid having to provide health insurance for adjuncts. Instead of seven courses a year, you can now teach only six. They plead poverty. That’s ridiculous, of course: the district rakes in millions of dollars in tuition, grants, and taxes, and is about to raise our property taxes again. The real reason is right-wing dominance in county government, which, like the state and most city governments here, is run by the kookocracy. They hate Obama and hate anything even moderately progressive, so they’re sinking their heels in the sand in an attempt to sabotage the Affordable Health Care Act.

Doesn’t apply to me, thank God, since I quit teaching freshman comp. But it will harm every adjunct who’s trying to scrabble together a living while pursuing the faint hope of a full-time position, and of course it will harm the hoards of part-time clerical, customer service, and admin staff the district hires.

I probably should try to pick up an online course at the Great Desert University. GDU pays adjuncts a munificent $3300 per semester (oooooohhh! $206.25 a week!!) for adjuncts with the Ph.D. But GDU still uses Blackboard — decidedly, it is not worth struggling with Blackboard for $206. And there’s no way I’m going into a face-to-face classroom again. It’s just too stressful and too dangerous.

Moment of Fame: This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance appears at Wealth Pilgrim. Proprietor Neal Frankle included the rumination in which I decided to keep the Dog Chariot.

How Is It Possible? Another Day from Hell!

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The past four or five days, I’ve been enjoying yet another goddamn health quirk: sudden stabs of agonizing pain in the eye, as though someone were pushing a needle through the backside of my left eyeball.

This has happened before, but in the past it’s only occurred once and then it’s gone away. This time, it’s not going away. And, as usual, a visit to the Hypochodriac’s Treasure Chest that is the Internet induces raw panic. Raw panic does nothing for one’s sense of well-being.

Awake at 1 in the morning, after a pre-bedtime jolt that felt like my eyeball was about to rupture. Whiled away the wee hours editing some pretty damned awful copy. Went back to bed around 4:00 forgetting to set the alarm clock so I could get out the door by 6:45. Slept until well after dawn.

And so missed my 7:30 meeting. And, interestingly, for a change there was a reason I was supposed to show up.

Got Young Dr. Kildare’s front office staff on the phone at 25 after 8:00. They suggested I should present myself to YDK at 9:00 a.m. sharp.

He observed that there wasn’t a thing  he could do about it. I needed to be seen by an ophthalmologist. I said I’d tried, but the earliest I could get in is a week from tomorrow. He said that would never do. I needed to be seen right now. He ordered his front office staff to find a practitioner and run interference with his or her front office staff.

They got me in to a doctor located in one of the city’s darkest slums, at 1:00 p.m.

My class runs from noon to 1:15. Said slum is a 40-minute drive from Heavenly Gardens Community College. I fly into campus, planning to dismiss class with a list of things to study for the Phaque Phinal.

I don’t bargain on Ms. Grandmère showing up with a gallon of milk and two packages of cooked-up mix brownies.

Nor do I bargain on today’s batshit craziness.

I appoint Ms. Grandmère as my unofficial substitute teacher and say “If anyone comes in here, tell them you’re the instructor.”

She says, “But I was a college dropout!”

I say, “That’s OK. I was a high-school dropout.”

The party is under way as I shoot out the door.

Run to my car, rocket across the freeway, navigate one of the scariest parts of the inner city, find said doc’s office. I’ve brought my laptop with me, because I have a rush editorial job to do, one that will pay decently, and I just know this last minute cram-me-into-the-schedule business is going to mean I get to cool my heels in the waiting room forever and aye.

When I get there, I turn on my computer and…wait. And wait. And wait. It won’t boot up. Mentally, I try to guess how much this apparent crash is going to cost me, right at the moment at which I decide to quit my job.

(As it develops, the thing was trying to download some new “critical” goddamn Microsoft updates — WHAT IS IT WITH THESE GUYS THAT THEY CAN’T GET THEIR SOFTWARE RIGHT THE FIRST TIME AROUND? — and because it couldn’t access a wireless connection, it hung. So I guess one thing, count it, (1), didn’t go totally wrong today.)

Finally I get in to see the doc. He’s an old guy, gringo but to my delight fluent in Spanish and not the least bit afraid of bureaucratic rules forbidding discussion of health-care issues in the native language of “illegals.” I like him, though I question his skills as an up-to-date diagnostician.

He decides I suffer from episcleritis and keratitis and recommends, in addition to four daily doses of prednisone drops, a hefty round of Motrin. I point out that in the ton of paperwork they made me fill out is mention of my allergy to the active ingredient in Motrin. He is dismayed to learn I am allergic to NSAIDs in general, since that is the mainstay of what he regards as the treatment for whatever I have.

By the time I escape his office, it’s two p.m. and I’ve had nothing to eat all day. I’m hungry. I take the Rx for prednisone and head for the pharmacy at my favorite Safeway, figuring I can pick up some food and a couple of foamydelicious canned beers to ease my general angst.

At the Safeway pharmacy, I encounter not a pharmacist but an assistant whose backwoods English is so illiterate as to draw notice, even here in lovely inland Arizona. After making me stand in line and then making me stand around some more while she figures out who I am and how to serve me, she announces that the pharmacist is on break and I should come back later this afternoon for the eye drops. I say I am tired, hungry, and in pain, that I have no intention of waiting half the day to get some prednisone eyedrops that no doubt are sitting on their shelves, that I can’t see to drive anyway, and that I want the prescription back so I can take it to the Walgreen’s across the street.

I practically have to throw her down on the floor and wrest the prescription from her fat, sweaty fist to get it back from  her.

Having achieved this, I proceed across the street, where the pharmacist forks over the eyedrops in about 30 seconds.

Starved, I stick some frozen sweet-potato fries in the oven and defrost a tiny piece of steak to throw on the grill. The steak is freezer-burned. Defrost another tiny piece from a newer package; cook both so as to feed the substandard piece to the dog. Phone rings. SDXB. Can’t make him understand that as soon as I’m finished eating and drinking myself into a well deserved stupor, I’m going to bed.  He keeps saying he’ll call me back after I have time to eat.

Administer prednisone, which requires lying down with eyes closed, while listening to SDXB talk. Get off the phone. Fix breakfast/lunch/dinner; overcook steak. Pained eye is so dilated it looks like the eye of an excited cat at midnight. Can barely see through it.

Decide to STET the appointment with the other eye quack on the 14th, since I suspect the old guy gave me a cursory look and had no clue what he was talking about but instead made a quick guess — particularly since I have exactly zero symptoms of keratitis and because he speculated the thing was some sort of allergic reaction, a theory that makes little or no sense. If there’s an improvement over the next day or two, bueno, I’ll cancel. But if not, at least I’ve got a foot in another door.

Never did get to take a nap. It’s almost 6:00 p.m. If I go to sleep now, which I desperately want to do, I’ll be awake at 10 p.m. and that will be that. Dog  hasn’t had her evening feast, anyway. Eyes hurt.

Entire day has shattered into tiny shards like a wine glass dropped on the kitchen floor. I have gotten NOT ONE THING done.

Why?

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Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer. . .

William Shakespeare
Richard III, Act I, Scene 1.

Alone this afternoon I stood in the empty classroom amid the thoughtfully designed seating, sunshine flowing through the ceiling-high windows, and I wondered: Why do I hate teaching? Am I making a neurosis of this? Or is there some reason I should hate what I’m doing so passionately? And if so, do I exaggerate that reason?

It wasn’t always thus.

Although I will say I’ve disliked teaching freshman comp since the first day I set foot in a roomful of sullen nineteen-year-olds as unhappy then as their children are now at being forced to take a hoop-jump course, nevertheless after I went to work at the Great Desert University’s west campus, I enjoyed teaching.

But then, our typical student was quite a different creature. When I started at West, it was an upper-division and graduate-level campus. The average student was a 32-year-old woman.

Teaching was great for six or eight years. You could even go so far as to say I loved my  job. Working with adult students was a joy, and I never taught composition. I taught upper-division courses in workplace, technical, and scholarly writing and advanced courses in editing. Pay was comparable to that of tenure-track people with the same number of years on the job, but because the full-time job was nontenurable, I didn’t have to worry about publishing (not that it mattered: my book was already published; had they seen fit to  hire me on the tenure track, I would have achieved tenure quickly) and when it came to academic politics, I could keep my head below the line of fire. This was good. Very, very good.

But then morale on the campus began to sag. Tenured and tenure-track people felt the effect of President Michael Crow‘s hostility to the Westside campus, which he regarded as a red-headed stepchild. Things became so bad that our department fractured in two. During one memorable faculty meeting, our chair and the instigator of the palace revolt almost came to blows; the only thing that kept them from physically engaging was two rows of tables that had been pushed together to form a barricade between them.

As things political went from bad to worse, the Crow administration decided to convert West into a four-year campus, despite the fact that we didn’t have enough faculty to handle an influx of lower-division students and that the several two-year community colleges that fed our campus opposed it.

Suddenly, everyone had to teach freshmen, trained in rhet-comp or no.

Certainly the faculty who had no rhet-comp training were abhorred by the idea. And those of us who were trained in rhetoric and composition were equally disgusted: if we’d wanted to teach composition, we would have sought jobs in the junior colleges or gone after teaching certificates and taken (better paying!) jobs as high-school teachers. If most lower-division students intuit that freshman composition is a fraudulent waste of time, Research One faculty know it is.

At about this time, I started looking for another job. I applied for three openings with the community colleges, figuring if I had to teach composition, I might as well be paid decently for it (starting pay for me would have been about 15 or 20 grand more than I earned at GDU West). One job was made for me, and I had contacts there who were pushing for me; however, an internal political conflict over whether the candidate had to be a person of color led to the position being taken off the market. Another job was promising but they called and asked me to create an elaborate PowerPoint dog and pony show just as final grades for four sections were coming due; overwhelmed with work, I simply couldn’t get it done. I applied in the business world, coming close to landing a corporate training job for an outfit that later proved to be even more fraudulent than the freshman comp scheme.

As the psychological and political clouds filled the sky over the West campus, I came to dislike my job more and more. Like everyone else in the department, I went to campus to meet my classes and, if forced to it, for the occasional departmental meeting; otherwise office hours were “TBA” and I stayed away as much as possible.

Despair was setting in when an opportunity arose to build and direct an editorial office at the main campus. Here, too, I had spies, and this time they served me well.

This was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. It was great.

Or…it was until, university-wide, steadily collapsing morale took its toll on the main campus, too. My main supporter retired early and fled the state. Her mentor and my office’s most powerful supporter fell ill with cancer and died. The administration’s ham-handed leadership and obsession with corporatizing the university devastated the faculty, shot tuition rates through the stratosphere, and set the stage for disaster.

Meanwhile, the economy was flying high. As I became increasingly dissatisfied with GDU as a place of employment, I conceived the idea that it wasn’t teaching I disliked: it was working. Period. With a phantasmagoric net worth of over a million dollars, I  considered simply quitting. When word got out that I was serious about walking, some issues that had to do with administration of my office were magically resolved from on high.

So I stayed, none too happily but nevertheless wisely, until the collapse of the Bush economy and a rabidly right-wing legislature openly hostile to education devastated the university. Funding dissolved and the administration was forced to can many hundreds of employees, among them me and all five of my staff.

As legislative madness targeted education and funding evaporated, the administration fired thousands, including me and all my staff. On the one hand, I really couldn’t afford to “retire” eight years ahead of schedule. But on the other, my joy at leaving was an ill-concealed secret. In a matter of months, I went from being financially comfortable to wondering whether I could afford to stay in my paid-off home, with no hope of ever seeing fiscal “comfort” again, as long as I live.

Do I really hate teaching? I wondered as I stared at the ten-feet-high and fifteen-feet-wide map of the world glued to the wall of the empty classroom. Maybe what I hate is working. Or, I thought, maybe I exaggerate this stuff with all the negative self-talk, which naturally is exacerbated by writing it into blog posts.

Maybe.

But maybe not. We have, for example, today, a bitch of a day crowning a string of days that made up a bitch. of. a. week.

No. I don’t think I’m aggravating myself into an irrational neurosis. It may very well be true that I hate working. But of all the kinds of work I’ve done in my life, academic and otherwise, I hate teaching freshman comp more than any of them. I hate putting up with this kind of garbage. And even though the chair was highly supportive when I described today’s Eng. 101 antic and said I figured the girl was laying groundwork to come back and beg me to let her turn in a paper two and a half weeks late; even though he urged me to refuse any such request, I hate dorking around with anything that is so stupid, so time-wasting, and so pointless.

I truly do hate teaching freshman composition on an adjunct basis, as I think anyone with a shred of self-respect and a particle of sanity would hate it.

And I’m so glad I’m not going to have to put up with it after December 13. Assuming I live that long.

Ever so much better to take up residence under the Seventh Avenue overpass.

Image: Portrait of Richard III of England, painted c. 1520, after a lost original, for the Paston family, now owned by the Society of Antiquaries, London. Public domain.