Why?

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.