Coffee heat rising

Teaching

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.

More Days from Hell

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Ugh, ugh, ugh! Will this never stop?

Yesterday:

• Up at 4 am.
• Blood test bright & early: H. pylori or not?
• Noon class, the one that takes a gigantic chunk out of my work day
• Take the disruptive kid by the hand, sit her down in a conference room with my chairman, and tell her how the cow ate the cabbage
• Race to the creative writing class for which I’m substituting: another 2½  hours

The day is done by the time I get home. Between 4 and 6:45 a.m., wrote two blog posts, answered e-mail, responded to blog commenters, put issues on paper for unruly student, hustled a graphic artist friend to do our brochure, watered plants, fed the dog, bolted down a chicken sandwich, and flew out the door. After class: too exhausted to move. Ate dinner, fell into bed.

On the docket today:

• Feed dog; forget watering plants, forget making bed, forget any and all other routine tasks
• 7:30 a.m. class
• Another confrontation: student who hasn’t shown up for 5 of the 10 class meetings turned in a failing paper; expects to be allowed to turn in a paper she didn’t do several weeks ago, asks to be forgiven for all the absences, and thinks she’s going to pass the course.
• Race from that to meeting with client.
• Race from client to Chamber of Commerce meeting
• Race home, try to work
• Choir practice: 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

I won’t get any work done, of course, because I’ll be too tired. I got up at 1:15 a.m.  Worked, spending part of the time trying to decipher nervy bird-brained student’s incomprehensible paper, 3 pages with no paragraph breaks. Went back to bed at 4. I’m now about to be late for class and haven’t even had time to brew a cup of coffee.

Bathtub’s full. Gotta run!

Is My Boss Watching?

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LOL! As if by magic, my excellent chair has been showering paid extra gigs on me this week! Did he read the last few days’ worth of rants and schemes to deep-six the teaching noncareer? Maybe he wants me to stay around.

Tempting enough, really. He is such a nice man! How many people can say that about their bosses? However many you guess, you can be sure many, many fewer academics can say the same about the chairs of their departments. A competent academic administrator who manages to retain his humanity is rarer than feathers on a cat.

At any rate, these little honoraria will help make up, in a tiny way, for the summer’s financial drought. And that’s nice.

Meanwhile, work continues to trickle steadily in the door. One long-time client has a publisher interested in (and the hook out for editors at another, even more prestigious house) a collection of testimonios, memoir-like essays by adult children of Mexican immigrants escaped poverty and ended up as academics and business executives. So far we’ve read two of them, both very interesting and in some places quite moving. And a newer client keeps manufacturing new projects. He seems to like our work, for which I’m duly thrilled and grateful.

If the editorial work keeps coming in, there’s no reason why the teaching endeavors can’t come to an end. You know, I enjoy the students, who are by and large interesting and good people. But the sense of futility aside—why are we jumping them through a hoop that teaches nothing for those who haven’t learned, after 13 years of schooling, how to write short essays or research papers and that is utterly unnecessary for those who have?—the amount of time a comp course requires makes it a huge distraction from the effort to get a business up and running.

Tomorrow, for example, I have to leave here at 6:45 to get to campus by 7:30 a.m. I have a meeting on the campus after class, so it’ll be 10:00 before I get back to the computer. Then I’ll have to turn around and race to a Chamber luncheon in Scottsdale, which will absorb a fair amount of the afternoon. Then we have choir practice in the evening. So that makes a day that begins at 4:00 a.m. (the hour at which I commonly write these blog posts) and ends around 10:00 p.m.

Today’s class starts at noon. That carves a huge chunk out of the middle of my day—obviously, I can work around it, but it breaks one’s concentration, and it means that whatever I’m working on will have to stop and start, and also that Tuesdays and Thursdays can’t be used for lunchtime networking. Thursday I have to give a dog and pony show at my 7:30 breakfast meeting, also in Scottsdale, then fly back into town for a doctor’s appointment, then meet the noon class again, leaving only the afternoon to do any editorial work. I need to go by a client’s office while I’m in Scottsdale but can’t do that and make the doctor’s appointment, too.

It’s not that there’s no time to work on the editorial business, but that a lot more time would be available without the constant interruptions for class meetings. On Thursday, for example, I could have made the doctor’s appointment later in the morning, allowing time to meet the client. Whether I can even get to the doctor’s office by 9:30 remains to be seen. In fact, as I think about it, it looks like I probably should call today and try to change that to a less hectic day…if any such thing exists.

 

The Opportunity Cost of Adjunct Teaching

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I just sat down and figured out the opportunity cost of teaching two sections of freshman comp, based on the $60 hourly rate we now know businesses will pay me and my sidekick, a figure we believe to be somewhat below market.

Hang onto your hats, folks…

If I teach two sections of composition—just two!—instead of billing the same number of hours for editorial work, it costs me $11,059 per 16-week semester in lost income.

That’s right. The privilege of earning $4800 in pursuit of your children’s higher education actually impoverishes me by more than 11 grand. In one semester.

Here’s a conservative calculation showing that to be true. Bear in mind that it doesn’t include commute time to campus (that would be six hours a week this semester) or the unpaid time we are asked to donate to departmental meetings and faculty development workshops.

Translation: I spend 96 hours in the classroom during a typical semester with two face-to-face three-credit sessions. My graders billed me $1,311 for plowing through the spring semester’s composition papers; at $10/hour, that suggests it takes 131 hours to read and assess a semester’s worth of postadolescent writing. Course prep for those two sections took me four full days this fall. Assuming I only worked eight hours each of those days (a very modest assumption!), that comes to 32 hours of prep time and website management. Thus the total number of hours consumed by two sections over a 16-week semester is 259. I’m paid $4,800 for all that labor, which, when divided by the number of hours required, works out to $18.53 an hour.

Not great, but not so very bad (as long as you don’t figure in the required and expected freebies).

Except…if I spent that many hours working at my editorial rate of $60 per hour (which, as it develops, is a little low), I would earn $15,540 during those 16 weeks.

Subtract the amount I actually earn, $4,800, from the real value of my time, and you get the opportunity cost: $11,059.

That is more than I’d need to earn all year—in 52 weeks!—to get by without teaching any comp courses.

Reality check! Could I actually do that much editorial work in 16 weeks? Let’s see…

Sixteen hours and eleven minutes a week? Somehow I think I can struggle through it.

If you’ll recall, though, yesterday I figured The Copyeditor’s Desk would need to earn only about $6,000 for me to get by just fine in 2013. Fifteen thousand five hundred and forty bucks is 2.6 times what I absolutely have to earn to pay the bills. So let’s prorate those hours over, say, 50 weeks—give me a two-week vacation, why not? This scenario would have me billing all of five hours and 10 minutes a week to earn enough to live rather comfortably, what with Social Security and a tiny drawdown from savings. Or actually, no drawdown: because Social Security covers almost half my expenses, an income of $15,540 would mean I wouldn’t have to raid retirement savings to live.

Think of that.

 

Life Is Short. Eternity Is Long.

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So another attention-getting life-shaker just happened. M’hijito called to report that his dad was going in for an angioplasty Thursday evening. Forthwith, though, they decided he needed a quadruple bypass and scheduled him into an operating room the first crack out of the box Friday.

Needless to say, my son was (and remains) alarmed. To say nothing about how ex-DH and his present wife must be feeling. Apparently the surgery went well. But it’s disturbing. Very disturbing.

For one thing, no one expected XDH ever to be anything other than extremely long-lived and healthy. His mother is still living—she’s pushing 100, and the only physical issues she has are macular degeneration that has made her blind and a lifelong hearing problem that has left her stone deaf. Her father lived to the age of 96, quite well all the way to the end. XDH is only 72, same age as SDXB, who underwent the same experience a couple of years ago. Whether XDH recovers as quickly and as completely remains to be seen: he’s nowhere near as fit as SDXB—never has been a fan of strenuous exercise—but he sure does enjoy good food and wine. And he has some pesty ailments that do not afflict SDXB, two of them potentially life-threatening over the long haul.

We are nearing the end of our journey, we who are on the leading edge of the baby boom. Most bypass veterans survive at least five years; the 15-year survival rate is about 55 percent. That, of course, means 45 percent reach the end before then.

And y’know…the perspective from here sure is different from what it was, even five or ten years ago!

Yesterday I shocked a few readers by proposing to spend an outrageous amount on some overpriced dishes. And by admitting this was a want, not a need…but still persisting in a plan to diddle away money on the junk, anyway.

It’s an apparent about-face, of course. This scheme contradicts everything I’ve advocated at Funny about Money. But it’s a manifestation of a new line of thinking that’s been ticking away in the back of my mind ever since that Mayo doc suggested that the current bellyache could very well be a symptom of a cancer that will carry me away in about six months. Should it really be that.

As I was driving away from that meeting, a haunting thought came to mind, one I haven’t been able to shove back under the rug:

I am making myself miserable trying to preserve capital so that I can support myself during some future time when I expect to be miserable.

Over and over, the same question returns: WTF am I doing????? Making myself miserable so I can be miserable? What is that?

I hate teaching freshman comp with every fiber of my being. After I’d taught two sections a semester (just two sections!) for about four years in graduate school, I walked away with the Ph.D. in hand and this vow in my heart: “I will go on welfare before I ever teach composition again.”

And now here I am, approaching the end of my life, and I am on welfare—collecting Social Security. And I’m spending these last few reasonably viable years doing just that: teaching freshman comp.

I loathe it more than I can express. It’s such a waste of time and energy, such a pointless exercise, and so intensely frustrating that it makes you feel every moment you spend on it is simply wasted. And wasted in ways that are not fun. This is not playing World of Warcraft here. It’s not diddling away your time in front of a movie screen. It’s far from playing with New Yorker jigsaw puzzles. It is hard goddamn work, and it is stupefyingly underpaid.

Time wasted: students’ and instructors’.

• The students have been over all this ground many, many times. We misapprehend when we assume they can’t write a simple sentence or a coherent paragraph, and they can’t formulate a topic for a diddly little 750-word essay because they were never taught this stuff. Trust me: they have been told this stuff. Time and time again. Among the fine young nimrods who couldn’t even begin to come up with a focused idea for the next 102 essay were two students who have been in my 101 classes…and I know I taught the 101s how to focus an essay topic. You wanna know something? If they haven’t learned this grade-school stuff after thirteen years of K-12 education, they are never going to learn it. It is an utter waste of their time to make them spend another year going over the same old stuff they’ve ignored all their lives.

• The instructor spends hour after hour, many of them unpaid hours, devising original and engaging strategies to instill grade-school knowledge and skills into young adults, to no avail. Many more hours are pointlessly spent reading, commenting upon, and assessing piles of student papers equivalent in mass to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. All of that person’s time, all of that person’s effort, and all of that person’s creativity are just wasted.

So why am I doing this?

Because I’m scared? I am. I’m scared unto paralysis by the prospect of living to advanced old age, utterly alone, and not having enough to provide even halfway decent dotage care for myself.

But of course, there’s no guarantee—or even great likelihood—that I will live into decrepitude. None at all.

The real reason I live like an anchorite, trying to scrabble together enough to barely live on so that I can avoid drawing down a very modest 4 percent of retirement savings, is that I’m in the habit of crimping my life for no other reason than to admire the bottom line in a spreadsheet.

In a word, I’m a tightwad.

I allow my life to be constrained to the point of entropy because I don’t want to spend any of my precious dollars. And yes: I am making myself miserable at a joke of a “job” (which is what adjunct teaching is: a cruel, exploitive joke) so that I can live on something well under $30,000 a year so that I won’t have to spend any part of $550,000 sitting in brokerage accounts and mutual funds, which are merrily averaging 6 percent to 8 percent per annum. For chrissake, the big IRA earned ten grand last month! That’s well over half, in one month, of what I earn in an entire year of making myself miserable in the classroom.

This returns us to that question: WTF am I doing?

Maybe I abuse the whole idea of money. Maybe my ex- is right: Money is to be spent. Not admired.

Hence, dear readers, the impulse to spend a little something on myself. On a want, not a need.

Yesterday, more or less in response to Remy’s and Frugal Scholar’s and Mrs. POP’s surprised comments, this whole train of thought came into sharper focus for me. And I realized: I have simply got to stop teaching composition. As endeavors go, it is just too crushing. It’s interfering with my life and blocking me from being able to build a business that I actually do like and that does not feel futile.

But how?

Well, the train of thought continues.

About 18 months ago, a friend in a business group suggested, with a straight face, that I quit teaching altogether for a year or at least for a semester and spend all the time thereby rescued on developing and marketing my editorial enterprise. Naturally, I smiled; murmured sure, sure; and went on about my misbegotten business. I was dead certain that I couldn’t earn enough at editing and ghostwriting alone to make put food on the table.

Recent developments, however, suggest that is no longer true. With a very minimal amount of marketing, a small but steady stream of commerce has come our way.

If I were not distracted with teaching—if I were not preoccupied with wasting the remaining hours of my life—but instead spent those hours on making my business visible to the kinds of people who would hire us and on persuading said people that they need us more than they need whole-wheat bread and sex, we would have more work than Tina and I could handle together. I don’t think that’s a “maybe.” I think that’s an “absolutely so.”

But even if it were a “maybe,” the truth is, at what we’ve learned is the fair rate for our services, I would not have to work anything like full time to earn enough to make up for the absence of teaching income.

Let’s say, for example, I keep the magazine writing courses, which are easy to prep, easy to teach, relatively low in enrollment, and mounted 100 percent online. I dump the spring and fall comp courses. And during the summer, when more skilled and motivated students show up, I teach one composition section. In that scenario, assuming blog income stays steady and my one regular customer keeps paying me to read detective novels(!), I would have to earn only $700 a month to make up the loss of the composition income.

At $60 an hour, $700 represents 11.67 hours of work. A month.

A single customer routinely gives us more work than that.

And does it or does it not bring us back to the eternal question: WTF am I doing?

Before the end of this semester (only 13 weeks to go!), I am going to tell my honored chair that I would like to keep the magazine writing course but drop the spring comp courses. And I will ask him if he would be kind enough to allow me to teach one or maybe two comp sections in the summer. Then I’m going to work on building The Copyeditor’s Desk:

• Attend at least two CofC meetings a month.
• Take full advantage of all the Chamber’s many marketing and advertising opportunities.
• Volunteer with charitable groups that are favored by the local movers & shakers. Get to know these folks.
• Join the Better Business Bureau.
• Join Local Arizona, a coalition of locally owned businesses.
• Start an advertising & PR campaign.
• Step up the communication with former clients.
• Approach major textbook publishers for project management contracts.
• Approach genre publishers in an attempt to get more of them to pay us to read light fiction.

And if that doesn’t generate seven hundred bucks a month? Welp…$700 a month is 2 percent of retirement savings. Somehow I think I can afford it.

Somehow, I think I can afford to have a life.

Images:

Still Life with a Skull. Philippe de Champaigne. Public domain.
Proto-composition paper: shamelessly ripped off the Web.

Turning Freshman Comp into Personal Finance 101

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{Cackle!} Tina came up with a great idea for the transformation my English 102 sections will have to make, come next spring: give them, as their overarching writing theme, personal finance.

How obvious is that, anyway?

Old-timers here know that, to avoid having to read their ungodly clichéd recycled high-school senior English papers (“Why Marijuana Should Be Legalized”…“True Beauty Is Inner Beauty”…“The Drinking Age Should Be Lowered to 18”…gaaaaahhhhh!), I’ve taken to providing defined subjects for my stoonts to write about. Last year I went further than that: I actually assigned specific topics for each and every paper, requiring me to dream up several hundred reasonably focused essay themes.

Although that approach has some advantages, it was a time-consuming pain in the butt, and it had the disadvantage of not giving them a chance to learn how to frame and focus a workable essay topic. This semester I came up with a new theme—Public Education in America—and established four broad subjects within that theme. Each classmate will be assigned one of those topics to cover for all of the required papers, but they’ll have to come up with their own specific theses. Because it’s a new idea, and because it’s a TRULY gigantic pain in the ass to build a course around a preset theme, I applied both to my Eng. 101 and my Eng. 102 classes.

That’s fine for the nonce, but my 101 students tend to follow me into 102. So come spring, I’ll need a new theme for the 102 sections.

Personal finance. Great idea, isn’t it? How often have we PF bloggers bemoaned the presumed financial ignorance of our young pups? IMHO, it remains to be seen if that’s real, since the Millenials are now being called “the cheapest generation.” Frankly, I think a lot of the kids who show up in the community colleges are pretty savvy financially. Most of them are working their way through, and when asked “what on earth are you doing here?” they’ll often say they’re at the junior college to get the gen-ed requirements and prereqs for their major out of the way before they move on to a more expensive four-year school. The state universities here—especially the Great Desert University—have jacked up tuition so high that any freshman or sophomore with an ounce of common sense has been driven away.

More’s the pity for GDU: now the kids with common sense are in my classes! And since they’re intensely interested in issues like student debt, controlling the costs of college and setting themselves up as young adults, I think they’ll turn on to the PF topic.

So…what say you? They’ll need at least four broad subtopics to begin with. One of them, obviously, could be “Debt and the Modern Student” or some such thing. Within the broad theme of personal finance, what specific subjects can I ask them to write about? Check out the format for this approach at the course website. They get four topics on which to write (and are assigned to groups to give each other some moral support and to present discussion panels on their topics). These are listed in the right-hand sidebar, with a bunch of links intended as kick-off points for research. All of the 102 essays are source-based (i.e., research papers). What topics would you like the next generation to study about personal finance?