employment

So now I’ve met my first class at Paradise Valley Community College. I haven’t read their diagnostic writing yet, but on the face of it I can’t see the students are much different from the ones at GDU West. A few are a little younger: in Arizona high-school kids can take community college courses, and so ambitious university-bound young people will get the widely hated freshman comp requirement out of the way in their senior year at the lower tuition rate.

If a few are probably not university material, they appear to have redeeming qualities. Some are older returning students, retooling for new jobs after having been laid off. The latter—older students—are always the best to have.

Yesterday I applied for the full-time position that came up at one of the colleges relatively close to my home, a day late and many dollars short. Probably won’t get it, but a friend at Paradise Valley says an opening may come up there. That would be a highly desirable place to work, and the commute would be easier because it’s a straight shot up the freeway, not ten or twelve miles across crowded, hectic surface streets.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to get a real job with the district. Back when things were beginning to get truly grim fin the morale department for everyone at GDU, I applied for several openings at colleges where the drive didn’t seem too awful (some of the schools are in far-flung suburbs).  As you can imagine, everybody and her little sister wants one of those jobs. A friend at Phoenix College told me her hiring committee got some 300 applications for a position I applied for there. Because these jobs are exceptionally well paid, for teaching—especially in the minds of liberal arts graduates, who perceive their prospects as dismal—the colleges often see applicants with Ivy-League degrees. This stiff competition is complicated by the politics of race: one job I tried to get was withdrawn when a faction on the hiring committee held out for a minority hire, and, because the job was not advertised as a targeted hire, the rest of the committee wouldn’t go along with it.

The closest I came to success with that endeavor occurred when a college that really was beyond reasonable driving distance called at the tag end of a semester and asked me to appear the following day prepared to deliver a PowerPoint presentation on a subject of their choice. The university had a strict deadline for when you could file your grades, and I still had fifty or a hundred papers to read and semester grades to assess, justify, confirm, and post. The deadline was the same day as the proposed PP pitch. I suggested they let me give a presentation on a composition-related subject that I had in the can; they wouldn’t accept that.

Weighing the probability that I wouldn’t get the job vs. the certainty that filing grades late would result in a black blot on my personnel file, I declined the privilege. Just as well: I hate driving around the Valley, and getting to that school would have entailed an endless drive over a freeway that seems to jam up every day.

After those two episodes, I got discouraged—one might say “sank into the morass of depression that afflicted all of my colleagues”—and stopped applying.

Obviously, given the possibility of earning $20,000 or $30,000 a year more for the same amount and kind of work I was doing at our supposedly more august university, I should’ve kept trying!

The district has three colleges within reasonable driving distance of home. I’m going to start applying for every single full-time opening that comes up in those three venues. Because of the recession, there won’t be many. But thankfully, Obama recognizes the importance of community colleges, and so some funding is being directed thataway. That a single full-time position came up at all is a good sign. There’ll be quite a backlog of people applying, and because many will be adjunct faculty already working there, I don’t have a snowball’s chance. But…

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.