Teaching

It gets better and better. Yesterday afternoon the division chair’s redoubtable admin called and asked if I’d take on another course this fall! He’d already given me the maximum allowable number of courses—though the magazine writing course doesn’t start till mid-October and right now has only three students—and so this in theory makes four sections.

I’ll be surprised if the magazine writing thing makes—but then, so far I’ve been surprised every semester. It’s akin to taking a course in buggy-whip design. Wish they’d build a course in blog writing and management into their course bank. Since some punkins we know are actually making a living at this, it seems to me to fit right into the community-college mandate: pragmatic education that fosters life-long learning and serves nontraditional students.

Oh well. With or without Buggy Whip Design 201, three sections of composition will save my bedraggled tailfeathers again! 🙂

Though it’s been a busy summer, I’ve really enjoyed teaching the two comp sections that came my way in the second session. Both were really good classes, but the 102 class was one of the best bunches I’ve ever had the privilege of pretending to teach. Smart, highly motivated, and focused, they worked together well and almost all of them responded to the assignments with a high degree of success. It’s been quite a pleasure to work with them.

I think these short courses attract students who are already pretty confident in their abilities, usually with good reason. It would make sense for a student who worries about her or his English skills to enroll in a 16-week course, providing more time to wrestle with the assignments and more chances to get help at the learning center. So apparently the five- and eight-week courses self-select into pools of fluent writers with good study skills. The only serious exception was a lovely young woman who had to deal with some ESL issues in her written (not spoken) English, and she, too, had good reason to expect to succeed: she’s only 16 and is enrolled this fall in AP calculus. Math and science are her strong fields, and she’s evidently so good at them that a grade below an “A” doesn’t register in her consciousness.

Well, back to the subject at hand, our favorite topic, money. This development will make it possible for me to revamp the cash flow scheme along the lines that Frugal Scholar has suggested in many of her comments here: simplifying toward minimalism.

The issue is how to survive on a variable income, one that can produce some paychecks as low as a couple hundred bucks and some upwards of seventeen hundred dollah. For the staid at heart, this does nothing to foster a state of zen calm.

My plan now is to make Survival Savings a kind of “pool” account. All money other than Social Security will go into this fund, whether it’s teaching income, RASL, income tax refunds, insurance reimbursements, or the annual Costco AMEX rebate.

Social Security lands in my checking account whenever the government feels like sending it—deposit dates this year have ranged from  the 7th to the 13th of the month. So that plug of income will form the base income for the month. On the first of each month I’ll transfer the rest of what I need to pay the bills from Survival Savings, which will now hold every penny of income other than Social Security. The first-of-the-month transfer will tide me over until Social Security is finally deposited. Because Social Security is a fixed payment, the amount I need to come up with from other sources is pretty much the same from month to month: about $1300, up from $1100 because of the not-really-inflationary increases in grocery and power costs.

Unfortunately, I’ll have to keep the self-escrow account to hold each month’s dribbles toward the annual property tax, homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, and Medigap insurance. Given my colorful arithmetic skills, I can’t afford to take a chance of accidentally spending so much that I can’t cover one or more of those costs. So there’s a bookkeeping complication that, alas, can’t go away.

And I’ll keep the emergency/diddle-it-away savings account, which helped a great deal with this summer’s dental and automotive exploits. It gets $200 a month.

Because of the rules about the number of transfers you can make from a money market or savings account, I guess those automatic transfers (for tax & insurance self-escrow and for the extraneous spending) will still have to come out of checking, rather than going direct from Survival Savings, which resides in the money market. To be safe, I think it would be better to make one transfer a month from that and then disburse the monthly self-escrow transfers from checking, which has no limit on the number of withdrawals one can make. That way, if a really big expense comes up, there’ll still be a few allowable transfers left on the money market account.

Burdensome banking rules notwithstanding, though, this scheme will fill in the potholes on the road to solvency. Despite the irregular income, the fact is if I’m teaching three & three plus anything else that comes my way, enough comes in over the course of a year to cover the bills—it’s just that in some months nothing comes in, and given my peculiar psychology, I find that unnerving. In a way, turning Survival Savings into a pool that collects the springwater of my on-again off-again income will make the variability of the income irrelevant. As long as Survival Savings lasts (probably another 18 months to two years), I’ll withdraw a steady, unchanging figure from it.

When it’s gone…well, then I’ll just have to come up with some new scheme.