by Faculty
At twenty minutes before dismissal time, I can think of nothing else to say but, “Class is over for today.”
As they all begin to scatter, a tall blonde student with a pigtail coiled on her head like a hat comes forward to stand before my desk. She holds the copy of her just-returned essay by the corners flat against her jeans like an apron.
“I—” Her breath gives out.
I gather that she is disturbed about something.
“I’ve never gotten a C before.”
This is a first draft of the first paper during the first semester for a first-year student. Her sentences seem to have issued from a shredder. She doesn’t know a comma from a period from a semi-colon, a “there” from a “their” from a “they’re.” She writes “would of” and “may of.” But she was “considered an A student” in high school. Hence, her surprise this morning.
“You’ll get to rewrite that. That’s the whole point of this assignment.”
“I have to get at least a B in this class.”
I stack my books on top of each other and put the stack of books on top of my folders. I snatch my pen off the desk and shove it into my breast pocket.
“If I don’t get a B, I’ll lose my funding.”
“You’ll get to rewrite the paper.”
#
My teaching gig is part-time, and I’ve been known to work as many as three jobs at once — Emergency Medical Technician for about fifteen years, plasterer and wallpaperer while my spouse still had his historic restoration business, small-scale vegetable and apple farmer, cemetery superintendent at present. My academic CV fits on one side of an 8.5 X 11 sheet of paper. When my fiction writing aspirations crashed, I took up old time fiddling. I drink cheap domestic red wine out of a Mason jar with an ice cube in it.
“Adjunct” is the perfectly suitable, adjective-turned-noun describing academic part-timers like me. It sounds like a vestigial body part.
A seasoned adjunct in our department teaches at least two sections of freshman composition per semester, with twenty students per section. We might be offered one section of creative writing. We are no longer offered any other courses, because this university is in a perilous financial situation and courses have been cut. Sometimes we’re called upon to teach a fourth section of comp., in which case we must sign a waiver so that we don’t get the idea that we are entitled to any extra benefits or anything. That makes the term “part-timer” a bit of a misnomer. Thus, “adjunct.”
This place contains some ignorant, desperate students along with the brilliant, calm ones, some of them on Adderall, all of them up to their armpits in debt. They are majoring in subjects that baffle me: Recreation and Leisure, Exercise Science, Media Studies. Regardless, they all are required to take my class. This particular section of college comp. is remedial, but we don’t dare call it that. We call it “enriched.” The students are barely literate—some even borderline illiterate—but that term is strictly verboten. So much of what we say around here has quotation marks around it. I’m teaching four sections the semester before the bottom drops out of this place where I have taught for over twenty years.
I have been moved yet again to a different shared “office”—a cubby hole in a “suite” at the back of an office of a different department—with four other adjuncts, whom I never see. Their names and “office hours” are posted on the outside of the door. There is a desk, two chairs, and a phone. A metal bookcase holds a few castoff literature textbooks and writers’ handbooks, freebies from publishers. The windows rattle in their aluminum casings, and there isn’t so much as a scrap of a curtain. At least I can look out over a well-tended, very green grassy field and watch well-muscled athletes running back and forth in baggy shorts.
In order to mark my space for another year, I unroll my poster of Charles Darwin and tape it to the plain white wall.
#
A colleague gives out her cell phone number to her students. She chats with them about who-knows-what, clarifying instructions, offering advice, while she’s busy at the photocopy machine duplicating materials. They text her their anxieties, and she texts back her “support.” This colleague can be seen in hallways trailing a flock of students, all female, with whom she shares an easy rapport. She is very popular, their mom-away-from-home.
I, by contrast, have a moat around me. This is partly disposition, partly by design. I grew up gay in a working-class, Catholic neighborhood in the Midwest, and have circumspection bred into me. When I was twelve, I tried out for baseball and was immediately cut from the team for my incompetence. So, instead of sports and socializing, my boyhood interests tended toward, first, dinosaurs and volcanoes; second, sketching and drawing; finally, boys my own age. But that was my little secret.
Failing students is not an easy thing to do. It is easier to fail papers and exams full of errors and omissions than boys and girls full of dreams and aspirations. To fail them on a paper is one thing, but to fail them in the course is to cut them from the team. But if they write the way I played baseball, then it is a judicious cut. If they want to play that much, let them try out again. I hated baseball. My going out for the team was a sham.
#
The woman with the pigtail hat comes up to me, weeping quietly, after class. She tells me that she has terrible anxiety, that she cannot read her work aloud to the class. In accordance with my favorite manual for teachers about how to teach composition, I have students read their work aloud around the room, no volunteers, no calling on students, no refusals. We just read in turn, I along with them. Afterward, we all write down quickly what we have noticed about a piece, something concrete about the use of language. But this student doesn’t want to participate. “I don’t like having people criticize my story,” she says.
“It’s OK,” I say. “No one is going to say anything bad about your essay. The point of the exercise is to learn to listen, to pay attention to what you hear. This is a first step toward academic literacy.”
Later, I receive a phone call from a counselor of sorts, “student support” or something. I’m advised that the student is very concerned about reading in class because of an anxiety problem. “Perhaps you should switch to a voluntary policy for reading aloud,” the counselor, or whoever, tells me.
The gall of this only occurs to me much later. This is not an adviser for a student with a disability; this is an apologist for a student who doesn’t like my class policy. Who is this person to tell me how to run my class? But I agree to switch to a voluntary policy for reading work, which is a terrible step backward, because a voluntary policy encourages long class silences.
At the next round of readings, the pigtailed woman is in attendance, sitting at the back of the room. I don’t look at her as I tell the students that today we will not all read in succession but rather we will hear from volunteers. Who would like to go first? After a short pause, a hand goes up in back.
It is the young woman with the pigtail.
#
I remember reading Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Creation Myths of Cooperstown” for the first time back in 1988 in a Best American Essays collection. It struck me even then as the perfect teaching tool, a potent combination of culture and science, fluently written prose, intelligence, and wit. It has gone on to be named as one of the best essays of the twentieth century. “You know a writer is good,” I tell the students, “when he can make a subject you don’t like [baseball] interesting.” Through baseball, Gould shows us that evolution is a perfectly ordinary, ubiquitous, totally comprehensible phenomenon. His thesis, articulated in multiple ways, is clear:
Abner Doubleday, as we shall soon see, most emphatically did not invent baseball at Cooperstown in 1839 as the official tale proclaims; in fact, no one invented baseball at any moment or in any spot.
Baseball evolved from a plethora of previous stick-and-ball games. It has no true Cooperstown and no Doubleday. Yet we seem to prefer the alternative model of origin by a moment of creation—for then we can have heroes and sacred places.
Gould’s use of implication is stunning: He doesn’t even have to say anything about the real subject, humankind, to make his point known. We were not created in The Garden of Eden in 4004 B.C., as the official tale proclaims. Darwin tells us we evolved from a plethora of previous apes.
The man Darwin was a competent stylist himself. In his first attempt to break to humankind the news of life’s common origins, published in the Journal of the Linnaean Society in 1858, Darwin asks us to contemplate the tremendous powers of selection over seemingly eternal time:
Yearly more are bred than can survive; the smallest grain in the balance, in the long run, must tell on which death shall fall, and which shall survive. Let this work of selection on the one hand, and death on the other, go on for a thousand generations, who will pretend to affirm that it would produce no effect . . . ?
To me, this is the most important idea humans have ever discovered—hence, the Darwin poster on my wall—and this is the idea that I enjoy teaching. But for this, I am deeply hated by a significant number of students. They call the department to say that I make fun of their religion. They accuse me of shoving Darwin down their throats.
#
Mid-way through the semester, after the third and final rewrite of an essay, the young, pigtailed student demands to be given another chance. “A C+ isn’t good enough,” she says. “I have to get at least a B- to keep my funding.”
“The final grade isn’t based on just one essay,” I remind her. “You still have seven weeks to bring up your grade.”
“I’m willing to do extra work. I have to have a better grade.”
I am a pushover. It is a major character flaw. Just touch my shoulder, and I topple over. Behind this lies a pathetic need to be liked.
“I will take the rewrite at the next class meeting.”
#
Things seem to fall apart all at once, but the actual process takes a year or so to play out. In short, this university has too much debt. We are running a deficit, and we are hemorrhaging students to community colleges.
The first bad sign was the email informing us adjuncts that there were no longer any sections of a self-designed literature class available for us to teach. These courses were cream-of-the-crop for part-timers with seniority. Mine was a survey of the Bible from the point-of-view of the skeptical lay reader. What fun it was to reveal to youngsters that there are actually two conflicting creation stories in Genesis, that the story of Noah’s Ark was cribbed from the Babylonians, that the Gospels are knockoffs of each other, that even the Bible evolved over time, like any entity. I used the Gould essay in this class as well. But goodbye to all that.
A semester later, a decades-old standby, Introduction to Literature, likewise bit the dust of the Earth. This was hard to believe: Not only could students get through college without a mandatory survey of English literature, but creative writing students could come into class with no literature background whatsoever.
With a shrinking pool of courses to divvy out, the English department began directing an excruciating game of musical chairs with adjuncts. But whole rows of seats were being taken out of the game, not just one chair at a time.
Finally, the “enrichment” was eliminated from the composition course. Instead of two different versions—the standard, 3-credit course, and the don’t-call-it-remedial, 4-credit version—we now had one course for all students, no matter what their SAT scores were. For all we knew, John Milton would take a seat next to Fred Flintstone.
The word “retrenchments” began appearing in the newspapers. Now there’s a euphemism to die for, “retrenchment.” I had to look it up. It means “lay-off.” Associate Professors were being disassociated. Not only that, whole departments were being cast off like so much ballast—a medical sciences program, French, Physics (!). But I was assured by several people in different departments: “They won’t get rid of you, you’re cheap.”
But, inevitably, a chair was stolen away from me. I was down to two courses. I checked the enrollments online nearly daily. The creative writing course—a sort of plank of sanity for me as these students have some experience and are of a higher caliber—was giving me heartburn: The enrollment number was stuck at six. Then it dropped to four. That probably meant students were also checking out the enrollments, and seeing that the course wasn’t filling they were defecting to other sections. The University wouldn’t let the course run with only four on board. I had to credit the English department for at least calling me on the telephone to tell me I was screwed.
#
Over the course of about eighteen months, I continued to lose courses to lack of enrollment, usually in the spring, and per the part-time bargaining agreement, I could not hold insurance unless I was teaching a minimum of two courses per semester.
The timing was spectacularly fortuitous, though: this was just after the arrival of gay marriage in our state and during the first year of the Affordable Care Act. So, as freshly wedded spouses (after nearly 30 years of living together), my partner and I applied as a pair for “Obama Care.” Not a moment too soon, either, as my spouse is a Type 1 diabetic with significant maintenance expenses.
During the financial smash-up, some longtime professors were cajoled into taking their retirement packages. Curious, I looked up the pay scale online. Several had been making a cool six figures. And I was grateful to hold onto my cold five. Yes, I’m “cheap.”
No complaints here, though. I would look at the lean semester as time off to practice my fiddle, to take a University Extension Master Gardener course, to learn to farm better.
#
Into this maelstrom sails my biennial personnel review. Reviews for adjuncts are based entirely on student evaluations. A moment’s contemplation reveals the bankruptcy of this procedure.
Every semester, between fifteen-to-thirty percent of the students in my sections of composition will fail the course. Another fifteen-to-thirty percent will receive As or Bs. This leaves a vast percentage who do moderately abysmally. Into the hands of these students at the end of the semester—when they know pretty well what their final grades will be—comes a piece of paper from the English department that says simply this:
Evaluate the course and the instructor.
These evaluations get filled out, collected by a student, delivered to an administrative assistant, and then passed on to the department’s writing committee. Someone on the committee reads them, and they go into a locked cabinet. After a semester has passed, I can request access to the cabinet and read them if I wish. But I learned long ago to ignore them. It’s not just the stupidity of the whole concept—having students who are required to take a course they hate and do poorly in to review the course itself—it’s that I know damned well I will read them in the most self-serving way possible, taking credit for the “good” ones and dismissing the “bad” ones as retaliatory comments made by failing students who have no other recourse.
During the biennial review process, however, the committee makes sure I see the worst student comments:
He was rude and condescending, making us feel incredibly stupid.
Although he smiled and laughed a great deal, it often appeared to be at the expense of a student.
My confidence as a writer is completely demolished.
There is no way of telling whether students who make such comments just hate the fact that they are failing, or whether they resent having Darwin “shoved down their throats,” or whether I actually suck. But it feels like being dumped on. Twenty years of teaching, for this?
I fire off the obligatory and ill-advised letter of protest to the department, which they judiciously and mercifully ignore. It contains this intemperate (but true) parody of the instructions for student evaluations, “Evaluate the course and the instructor”:
Hi. You’re flunking this course and you know it. You hate the instructor because he has a ponytail and because he told you twice to put your cell phone away. You are pissed off at him because he refused to allow you an extra rewrite beyond the three he gave the rest of the students. He has a policy which he strictly enforces that allows you only four absences, so you have to sit here while he drones on and on about subordinate clauses and evolution, which is an abomination. You’re going to lose your funding, and you’re going to anger your parents, when grades are posted.
Please feel free to write whatever you wish about this instructor. It doesn’t have to be well-written or even true. You can be assured that you will remain completely anonymous and that your comments will be repeated in personnel reports distributed throughout the English department.
Have fun!
Playing it safe and wanting to prove to the department that I’m “doing something,” I drop Darwin and Gould from my syllabus. Later, I will request to teach only creative writing.
#
It is the end of the semester, and I’m exhausted but looking forward to summer when I can hop on the tractor and forget about all this shit. When I approach the classroom, the young woman with the coiled pigtail hat is waiting for me outside the door.
“Here’s my paper,” she says, holding it out to me. “I’m driving home early today because it’s raining. Will it affect my grade if I miss class?”
Touch my shoulder, I fall over.
Instinctively, I look at the last page of the paper. There is no “Works Cited” page. She hasn’t even attempted to document her work.
“You know the policy. You’re permitted to miss up to four classes.”
“So will it affect my grade? I have to get a B-.”
I have no idea how many absences she has, and I don’t feel like getting my grade book out of my satchel. She should have an idea, though; and if she doesn’t, what the hell is wrong with her?
“Everyone else has to come to class, why shouldn’t you?” I duck into the classroom.
She does not follow me inside. I sit down and face the class. They are all sitting there with their papers, in a half-circle of chairs, facing me. I will be failing nearly half of these students, either because they haven’t come to class regularly, or because they haven’t turned in all their work, or because the work they have turned in looks as if it was composed a half an hour before class and they haven’t even checked to see that they’ve used the correct font and double spacing. It is a class to grind through, to endure to the end. I collect papers, then redistribute them along with a peer editing worksheet. I have them read a colleague’s paper and check matters we have spent several weeks discussing.
At the end, after I’ve collected everything and everyone is filing out of the room, I see the young woman standing there outside the classroom door. She is crying. Once the room has emptied of students, she and an older staff member enter the classroom.
“Hi. This student came down to my office a little while ago and said you were rude to her. I figured it was best just to come up here and see you to clear it up.”
They both sit at desks before my table. The student is sobbing. I can feel the blood draining from my head and pooling inside my chest cavity.
“Why don’t you just tell him what you told me a little while ago?”
The student sniffles and rubs her eyes. She stammers and stutters. To this day, I cannot recall a single word of what she said, but the gist of it was that I was mean to her before class like I have been all semester and she has to get home because it’s raining but she doesn’t want to endanger her funding by getting less than a B- in the course.
I sit there pretending to be paying attention to what she is saying, trying to maintain a professional demeanor, but I’m really telling myself, Breathe, just breathe, because that is what everyone says you should do when you get really angry, just sit there and listen to your breathing—which is not working because my breaths are coming very short and shallow.
There is a moment of silence.
He was rude and condescending, making us feel incredibly stupid. My confidence as a writer is completely demolished.
Again, as with her stammered comment, I cannot recall a word of what I said in response. The gist was that I had been putting up with this student’s emotional bullying all semester and I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. Complain, wheedle, pester, and if none of that works get staff involved and turn on the tears to prove what a meany I am.
I got up and left the classroom because I had to drive twenty minutes to the main campus for my next class.
I turned around and re-entered the room: Slapping her paper down on the table, I said, “And this doesn’t even have a Works Cited page.”
#
Somehow the ship rights itself. The university is not going to sink out of sight after all. I no longer have to fiddle while it burns. But in the constrained financial environment, I do have to teach the same class over and over, for years, while trying not to imagine that I’m just cranking out widgets.
_____________
Image
“No! You’re supposed to spring ahead, not fall!” by quinn.anya is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.