Vicious Circle

I had an epiphany today.  It occurred to me that as an adjunct professor I actually have something in common with corporate CEOs: Employment and pay aren’t necessarily tied to job performance.

The first week of classes went very well.  Three sections full and about half a dozen students seeking to add each of the other two.  I met with my last section of the week yesterday afternoon and went to my office to catch up on administrative work.  Opening my email I saw that the top message was from Matt, my department chair at Snowflake College.  The subject was simply titled “spring” [sic].

The message wasn’t what I expected to read.

From: Matt (chair@snowflake.edu)
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 1:50 PM
To: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@snowflake.edu)
Subject: spring

Hello,

I hope that all is going well.  I am working on the schedule for next semester and was wondering which Quartz City section you prefer - day or night.

Things had been going well—until now.  As happens so often when I get messages from administrators and chairs my heart leaped into my throat. 

Here’s a little background so you will understand my problem.  I teach at two institutions on three different campuses.  Snowflake is a multi-campus institution covering a large geographical area.  I live more than eighty miles from the main campus where Matt and the other profs in my department work.  For the last several years I have been the sole instructor in my subject at my “home” campus in Treetop, a resort town in the mountains, and at the Quartz City campus in the foothills roughly sixty miles away.

Although I am the least senior part-timer in my department, even after nearly a decade of employment, no one based at the main campus is willing to make the long drive into the hills to take sections at Quartz City and Treetop thus giving me a de facto monopoly.

Or so I thought.

From: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@snowflake.edu)
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 2:01 PM
To: Matt (chair@snowflake.edu)
Subject: Re: spring

Hello Matt...Is there someone else teaching at Quartz City next semester?

The answer came a few minutes later:

From: Matt (chair@snowflake.edu)
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 2:05 PM
To: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@snowflake.edu)
Subject: Re: spring

We are in the process of looking at adding some part time faculty and Quartz City would be an option.  In the past we have had two folks up the hill, which gives us some safety should we lose and instructor and it gives students so [sic] diversity.

I was puzzled and slightly disturbed by that last comment.  I told myself that he meant giving students a choice of instructor rather than being stuck with just me but it didn’t help.

I pondered my options, staring at the computer screen momentarily paralyzed with anxiety.  I remembered a remark the Quartz City campus executive dean (not to be confused with the Executive Dean from Hell at the Treetop campus) made last week during a faculty in-service meeting.  She said that the demographics of the Quartz City area were changing and that Quartz City was transitioning from a predominantly evening campus to a day campus. 

I replied:

From: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@snowflake.edu)
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 2:27 PM
To: Matt (chair@snowflake.edu)
Subject: Re: spring

I understand the reasoning, though I clearly would prefer both QC sections.  Treetop has me tentatively scheduled for TR 4:00-5:20, which means it probably won't make enrollment.

If I have to make a choice the TR 12:30-1:50 section would be the best fit.

The next volley landed in my inbox shortly thereafter:

From: Matt (chair@snowflake.edu)
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 2:50 PM
To: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@snowflake.edu)
Subject: Re: spring

Hi,

Interesting.  Patty sent a rollover indicating that it was taught 2:30-3:50 last Spring.  I imagine that they will cling to that section (regardless of the time) to the bitter end in Spring - they do not want to lose course offerings entirely.

We will list the night course as staff and see what develops; we might need you to take it on in the end.  It all depends.  But I hope to clear up the uncertainty as soon as possible.

Best wishes

Yep, clearing up the uncertainty would be pretty frickin’ great.  Going over the message a second time I found myself wondering about Matt’s odd practice of omitting his correspondent’s name from the salutation and his own from the closing.  I was also confused by the lack of precision.  Was “it” a section at Quartz City or Treetop?  “It” didn’t match the schedule I’d been on at either campus any time lately.  The Executive Dean from Hell’s administrative assistant at Treetop is named Patti, so maybe that’s the campus he meant.

From: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@snowflake.edu)
Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 3:01 PM
To: Matt (chair@snowflake.edu)
Subject: Re: spring

Hi Matt,

Last spring I taught a Monday evening section at Treetop.  Believe it or not, that class filled and ran a wait list.  This semester, nothing.   I don't know if it's scheduling or just the fickle nature of student demand on a small campus.

If you are referring to QC, all the TR afternoon sections I've taught there from Fall 2012 forward have met at 12:30.

I'll try to keep my dance card open Weds. evenings just in case.

Thanks,

Unassuming Scholar

I sat slumped in my desk chair, utterly deflated.  It’s been a day and I still feel this way. 

I honestly don’t understand why the department chair wants to scale back my workload.  For all the heartburn I’ve had with Treetop’s EDFH, my department has been great to work with.  Unlike Verdant Fields, my other institution, adjuncts participate in scheduled department meetings and our input is solicited on student learning outcomes for each course we offer, whether our institutional objectives are being met, best teaching practices, etc.  It’s all very collegial and an exception to the norm for part-timers elsewhere.  Until yesterday I honestly (and I guess naively) believed I was a valued member of the team.

It can’t be my performance.  It just can’t.  My last classroom evaluation was a year ago and it went swimmingly.  Matt solicited the students’ input while I was out of the room, which was provided along with the very positive write up of the visit.  Not a single negative comment from the class.  I even got an “attaboy” note from our associate dean.

That’s why the decision hurts so much.  I know I complain a lot in these pages about lazy, entitled students and self-interested administrators but I thoroughly enjoy the act of teaching.  Sure, I have my off days like anyone.  But when I’m in the “zone,” when the students are engaged by what I’m saying and every single one of them is hanging on my every word, it’s the best feeling in the world.  It is the closest experience I have to love in my life and it is painful to me when any of it is taken away.

Now I’m on tenterhooks awaiting my fate.  Treetop will continue to toy with me, and Snowflake’s part-time seniority system is the only thing keeping me on staff.  Not that EDFT wouldn’t jump at the chance to show me the door.  The funny thing is that she doesn’t know me well even though she’s been in her position for nearly seven years.  I got on great with her predecessor, but EDFH and I have never even had a proper conversation.   The only conclusion I’ve come to is she formed an immediate and irrational dislike of me at first sight.  One factor in her dislike is that I think my appearance and manner clash with her idiosyncratic vision for the campus.  The executive deanship at Treetop campus is a platform for EDFH’s vanity and she wants nothing or no one to contradict her viewpoint.  Unless I can outlast her, which I doubt, I’m basically screwed.

I still haven’t heard about spring term from Daniel, my department chair at Verdant Fields Community College which is located in a neighboring state 35 miles from Treetop.  The pay at VFCC is uniformly lousy with no seniority or benefits.  But Daniel has consistently assigned me the maximum allowable three sections per semester for years.  (Another plus of VFCC is that the support staff in every single office and department I’ve encountered have been without fail friendly and helpful toward part-timers.)  But Daniel warned me over the summer that he might not be able to offer me three sections for spring.  Our former academic dean is from our department and he returned to the classroom this year, reducing the number of sections available for part-time faculty.  That reasoning I can understand even though I still wish to have three sections.  Besides, the ex-dean is an established authority in his field…and he is a great guy to boot.

Meanwhile I’m trying to calm my nerves.  I worked with a much smaller teaching load for years and still got by financially.  My oldest son is an adult now and I’m not paying support, which eases some of my money problems.  I’ve built up my savings the last two years.  I tell myself it could be worse.

And that is the problem, particularly at Snowflake.  A smaller load slows my accrual of further seniority and salary step increases.  Snowflake faculty participate in our state’s public school teacher retirement fund which requires the equivalent of five years’ full-time employment to vest.  Fewer classes mean I have to work more years to be eligible for retirement.  (By contrast VFCC is in a Right-to-Work state.  It’s “retirement” system consists of mandatory contributions to a 457 fund.)

I do not know how much longer I can keep at this.  I have a small pension from my earlier career but the income stream doesn’t cover even my modest lifestyle.  My younger son, to whom I am obliged to pay a monthly allowance while attending college, turns 22 in a little more than five years ending my financial responsibility for my family.  I had hoped to have enough money put together by then to retire from teaching and moving to an expat-friendly country such as Mexico or Belize to live.

That looks much less likely now.  Course load reductions can send a part-timer into a vicious spiral.  As his teaching income shrinks, the adjunct has to look for supplemental income or give up teaching altogether to stay afloat.  The thought of leaving the classroom is hateful to me.   It is an integral part of my identity, and I am too old to begin again at something else.  I don’t want to do anything else.  This is my calling.

If only the people I work for understood this.  Unfortunately for me I am only another wheel in the machine to them.   

I guess that’s what I am.  Expendable.

I think I will crawl into a bottle of bourbon this weekend.  There doesn’t seem to be much else left to do.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar 

A New Generation in the Workplace

Yeah, I know this has been around a while.  I just needed to cheer myself up during the first week of classes.

Enjoy.

Face Blind

The other day I stopped by a deli to pick up dinner.  As I approached the counter the young woman behind it smiled broadly and greeted me as if she knew me.

“Oh my gosh, how are you?”

“U-h-h-h-h… hi?”

After a split second it occurred to me that she did look familiar, but I still couldn’t place her.  She was quick to fill me in.

“It’s Lindsay,” she said helpfully.  “I took your class last fall.”

Oh, right.  “Hi.  Sorry about that, I didn’t recognize you without your glasses.”

These little embarrassments are happening with me more frequently lately.   I’m glad that the former students who recognize me seem pleased to see me, but I’ve had hundreds of them over the last ten years or so and I’m not capable of recalling all of them as much as I would like to.

Many instructors I work with are better at this than I.  I’m not sure how they do it.  I pride myself at learning the names of every student enrolled in my classes within the first month of the semester, but once grades are in the information magically vanishes.  I do remember a few of the standouts from over the years, good and bad, but most are lost to my memory.

This doesn’t bother me ordinarily, at least until I encounter the next student who remembers me better than I remember him or her.  I still feel rather badly about a run-in I had a few weeks ago on the last day of spring semester.  I was walking with colleagues after class on our way to grab a well-earned drink.  As we walked past a couple of students lounging on the grass next to the quad's artificial pond one of them waved and called out, “Hey, Mr. Scholar!” 

I stopped.  She seemed vaguely familiar, but so do half the students on campus. 

“Remember me?”  She was smiling expectantly.  God, this was going to be awkward.

“Sure!”  I paused a beat hoping she would take the hint and remind me how I should recollect her.

“I was in your Wednesday night class a while back, remember?”  No, not really.

Suddenly I was able to place her.  Not her name, but that of her boyfriend who took the class with her.  “Ah, right, you’re Dylan’s…friend.”

The girl pouted, “You remember Dylan’s name but not mine?”  She actually looked hurt.

I felt my face redden slightly.  “Sorry," I stammered.  "I’ve had so many students in so many places for such a long time.  I try, but I can’t remember everyone.”  Seeing my friends getting away from me I sheepishly excused myself and rushed to catch up.

“Alyssa!” the young lady’s voice called after me.  “My name’s Alyssa!”

I turned.  “Take care, Alyssa!” I called back.

Most encounters aren’t this bad.  I try to remember their names when I recognize their faces and play along gamely when I don’t.

It’s funny, though.  When I taught my first course as an instructor of record (that is, without the training wheels of a tenure-track professor’s supervision), I thought it would be like first love.  I vowed never to forget my students’ names, particularly when they were such a wonderful group who cheerfully forgave all my rookie fumbles that semester.

Seven years later during commencement one of the students walking the stage looked awfully familiar.  As usual, I couldn’t place him at first.  He was a stocky, nondescript looking boy with a close haircut.  Then it struck me.  He had been a student in my very first class.  Not a very good one it turned out; checking my records the kid finished with a D.  No wonder it took him seven years to complete a two-year degree.  Seeing him made me think about that first class, and it dawned on me that I could not recall a single name of any of its students.  So much for first love.

I give it my best effort, but I as get older my memory becomes less reliable.  But I do experience the occasional victory.

Walking out the door of the deli, wrapped sandwich in hand, I bumped into a young man I recognized.

“Hi…Trevor,” I said tentatively.

I must have gotten it right, because the young man smiled and said, “How’s it goin’, Mr. Scholar?”

I walked out to my car feeling quite pleased with myself.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

An Inauspicious Start

It’s a full week before classes begin and my schedule has already begun to shrink.

An email at the top of my inbox this morning: The sender is The Executive Dean from Hell.  This can’t be good.  It isn’t.

Among her many gifts she is apparently psychic.  With eight days to go before the first meeting of my Tuesday-Thursday afternoon section she’s pulled the plug.  It was at 85% of our institution’s minimum retention threshold. 

Really?  More than a week to spare, and there was no possibility of getting two or three more students to enroll?  As if students never sign up for classes at the last minute?

At least this time she wrote she was “sorry”…

Entropy

Lately, I’ve been having my morning coffee at three in the afternoon.

An inexplicable lassitude has taken over.  I can’t motivate myself to get out of bed for more than eight or ten hours at a stretch.  I know I’ll have to change my ways soon, since in-service week for the new semester begins Monday with Convocation.  I face the coming weeks with a sense of dread.

But here I lie, laptop on the covers as I type this.  Things around me are in a state of disarray.  I’m normally proactive about fixing what’s amiss in my life.  Since winter, though, the fluorescent lights in the kitchen remain burned out, the venetian blinds in my bedroom hang unrepaired with a blanket tacked over the window, and the garage door opener stays broken.  I did replace the light bulb in the refrigerator yesterday.  Got to see what I’m reaching in there for, you know.

Part of the problem is a partially healed foot injury from last spring that’s left me with weakness in the left ankle and an unsteady stride.  Some of the things I ordinarily do over the semester break I’ve skipped out of apathy, others I do for the sake of doing.  I’ve been down to the lake a couple of times for drinks and socializing with perfect strangers.  Last night I even managed  to get down a light appetizer.  It’s the biggest meal I’ve had in days.  Felt good to get out but I don’t think I’ll do it again soon.  Thought I’d take in Romeo & Juliet at the local Shakespeare festival, but the final two weeks are sold out.  Too bad.

I’ve made a few advances.  I completed the syllabi for my classes.  I’ve updated the learning management system files.  But mostly I watch TV or putter around the internet.  I’ve kept up with the freelance work I do during the break, reviewing textbooks and such.  I ask myself if it will be practical for me to retire in the next year or so without the income from teaching, sparse as it is.

I have spent my time in partial disengagement from the world, communing with myself and asking questions which wouldn’t occur to me ordinarily.  My upstairs neighbors, for instance.  I live in a first floor condominium.  The owners upstairs rent out their unit and sometimes the tenants aren’t the most congenial.  The young couple who lived there last year had me at my wit’s end.  They had a newborn who bawled all night, every night.  Dad was like a hyperactive chimpanzee.  Why walk when you can stomp, back and forth across the apartment for hours on end every day?  The plates in the kitchen cupboard would rattle with every footfall.  After months of this agony my complaints to their landlord finally had an effect and these neighbors from hell were mercifully gone.

The new neighbors seem to be a couple in the late thirties, early forties.  I have only seen them a couple of times.  They seem awfully young for the life they appear to be living though.  At least one of them spends most of his or her days in bed.  I can tell from the periodic creaking of the floorboards above me as s/he gets up or down.  All this started after they had been away for about a week a month ago.  Surgery?  A chronic illness, cancer perhaps?  It’s strange to feel concern for perfect strangers when you know so little about them.  Then again maybe they are in my situation and simply have a lot of time to kill.  Maybe nothing’s wrong at all.  But still, I wonder.

I guess I should focus on something to look forward to.  Not the coming academic year; I’m too jaded for that.  Something simpler, something more easily undertaken and accomplished.  There’s a Law & Order marathon on TV tonight.  No, too far off.  The mail just arrived.  I could make the short walk to the mailboxes and back.

I think I’ll get to that tomorrow.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Security (Or, A Latter Day Luddite's Lament)

The online world can be a dangerous place.  This is particularly true when it comes to the threat of identity theft or controlling online access to bank or investment accounts.  I wonder, though, if we are putting up too many walls.

I routinely visit nearly two dozen password protected websites, some containing sensitive information, others not.  Each has its own password rules; when auto-fill doesn’t do the trick I sometimes have to resort to my not so reliable memory to get access.

I recently refinanced my house.  The amount of my monthly loan payment, made by electronic funds transfer, is scheduled to change.  I duly logged on to my bank’s website.  A process I thought would take less than a minute and a few keystrokes has stretched into a month-long headache.

Turns out that my bank, which shall remain nameless, now requires an extra layer of security to make changes to EFTs.  I was obliged to enroll, for the low, low price of $19.99, in the bank’s security program. 

Two long weeks later, a card arrives in the mail.  It’s a neat little gizmo that generates random numbers via an embedded chip.  Two of these randomly generated numbers must be entered correctly into the website before any changes can be made.  Unfortunately, the card I received has a bubble in its LCD display obscuring part of the number.

Undaunted, I called the bank’s toll-free number.  The customer service guy I spoke with said he’d text me two access numbers right away.

Here is where I must digress.  I am one of the last individuals over the age of, I don’t know, five who doesn’t carry a mobile.  And I won’t.  There is no one—no one—on the face of this earth I need or want to be immediately in touch with 24/7.  The displays on most smart phones are hard for me to read, and lacking the use of one of my hands it’s difficult for me to enter text on touchscreens. 

It is not much of a stretch to say that I detest the telephone.  It’s a holdover from my first career, when I did have to be available 24/7.  As much as I gripe about it, I like having a job where I’m not on an electronic leash.  The only reason I have a landline is so I can call 911 in case of emergency.  Call me, and you’ll be told to leave a message.  You will get a call back at my leisure.

The customer service rep was surprised, as everyone who asks for my mobile number or asks me to add theirs to mine is.  The title of this piece notwithstanding, I’m not really a Luddite.  I like technology when it works for me and doesn’t make me a slave to it.  Computers and the internet are great and have helped me enormously in my work.  I believe email is one of the greatest inventions of the late 20^th century.  I wouldn’t know how to spend my weekends if I couldn’t binge watch TV shows on Netflix.  But I draw the line at carrying a mobile.

Back to the contretemps with the bank.  The guy I spoke with said he’d send a new card.  Arrival window: 7-10 working days.  And, no, they could not offer expedited shipping. 

Cut off from the digital frontier of my own accord, I went to my local branch.  The nice young man I sat down with said he was unable to manually make changes to my account.  He offered to send numbers I could use to my mobile.  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask why they even have branch banking if they can’t fix problems like mine in person, but I simply nodded and said I understood now that EFT changes could only be made through online banking.

I contacted my lender.  They assured me that I could make my first payment by check.  An old fashioned, paper check.  The inconvenience notwithstanding, the Luddite in me is smiling.

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar

Waning Days

The end of summer and the start of fall semester approach inexorably.  I’m already starting to experience the first twinges of apprehension as the new school year draws near.

The first sign is the Syllabus Dream.  I have it without fail at least once in the days and weeks running up to beginning of a new term.  The Syllabus Dream is a variant on the common naked-in-public dream.  The plot: I show up for my first class meeting but I forget to bring copies of the syllabus!

That’s it.  I don’t know why my anxiety expresses itself this way.  While actually forgetting the syllabus on the first day might be mildly embarrassing, it’s hardly the worst classroom mishap to befall an instructor.  But the dream always recurs. 

I shouldn’t complain.  I’m scheduled, tentatively of course, to teach six sections in the fall—three at Snowflake College, three at Verdant Fields.  I taught six in the spring, too, plus a summer section.  The income boost allowed me to squirrel away a little more money for contingencies such as the inevitable day my elderly Subaru finally breaks down, home repairs, doctor’s bills, or whatever potential catastrophes my fertile imagination has me wringing my hands over at any given moment. 

The extra cash also gave me a rare opportunity to indulge myself.  As soon as I turned in my summer session grades, I flew off for a week in Dublin.  I have loved Joyce’s Ulysses ever since I first read it in 11^th grade.  (This was on my own initiative; it strains credulity to envisage the novel being taught in any American high school).   I wandered the city retracing the footsteps of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, beginning with the Sandycove Martello tower and ending at the entryway of Mater Hospital on Eccles Street which now stands on the site of the Bloom residence. 

When I wasn’t hunting literary landmarks, I wandered Temple Bar and Grafton Street, toured the Guinness Storehouse and Old Jameson Distillery, and even discovered my new spiritual home away from home at O’Neill’s pub on Suffolk Street.  (My previous one, an expat tavern named Old Germany in Seoul’s Itaewon district, is long gone.  I am so happy that I was finally able to fill that particular void in my heart.)

Of course, you can only escape daily life for a short period of time.  Now I’m back, and so is my insomnia, chronic heartburn, and a half dozen other minor ailments I thought would go away once the academic year ended.  But the job is never far from my mind, and with good reason.

Working as an adjunct professor has its inherent worries.  Too much work (not that this occurs very often), too little work, last minute cancellations of classes due to low enrollment, apathetic students, overeager students who are more interested in resume building and their grades than in actually learning, students who bring their personal issues with them to the classroom, unconcerned administrators who know their jobs aren’t at risk regardless of the vicissitudes of enrollment, and finally, the all-important student evaluations which have trivialized my work by making it into a popularity contest pitting me against both students and colleagues. 

While I believe I am a competent teacher with a comprehensive knowledge of his field, over the years I’ve found myself pandering to my students.  I have a good sense of humor and can manage the multimedia capabilities of the contemporary college classroom to keep students engaged.  I also unload a lot of the learning responsibilities onto the students, at least in principle, through small group work sessions which inevitably become socializing opportunities.  (Never mind the drawbacks, “active learning” is a “best practice” prescribed by the nabobs at teaching and learning centers at colleges and universities everywhere these days.)

Generally, I get good reviews on the college-administered student evals.  Oh, there’s the occasional student whose knickers get in a bunch over something trivial, but my numbers are solid and most of the comments quite positive.  But I’ve found that I can’t always count on the goodwill of the majority. Something’s changed in the classroom dynamic over the past four or five years, and it’s got me concerned.

I had been teaching for nearly seven years before my first confrontation with a student.  I’d sometimes hear stories from colleagues, but I did not think that a nice guy like me with fair, even lenient policies would ever experience trouble.  But this past year alone, just at one campus, I had three run-ins: The first two involved a chronically absent student who demanded I not deduct attendance points because of an alleged death in the family and another who went on vacation in the middle of the semester and was miffed because I wouldn’t let her make up an exam she knew was scheduled when she booked the trip.  In each case they whined to my department chair and got their way.

But it was the third incident which really unsettled me.  It involved a “mature” student in his forties—I’ll call him “Benjamin”— who was an average performer at best, sat apart from the other students, and seldom participated in the group work.  One day he took exception because I momentarily raised my voice in a large classroom with poor acoustics to get the class’ attention, an incident which every other student in the room seemed to forget as soon as it passed.  I forgot too…

Until the next day, that is, when I got an urgent voicemail from the chair.   Turns out Benjamin not only posted what can only be called a screed on the course LMS accusing me of being “violent” and “terroristic” in my manners, but he telephoned and emailed the college Vice President for Instruction demanding that I be fired.  Good fortune was on my side that time.  Both the division dean and the chair sat down with the guy, decided he was a bit “off,” and transferred him to an online section which had not yet begun.

Will I be so lucky the next time something like this happens?  What if it doesn’t end in phone calls or emails?  One dissatisfied “customer” with an agenda, and I could be out the door in a heartbeat without the due process afforded tenured faculty.  Actually, there are even worse possibilities: Last fall one prof at my institution got death threats from a student; another had to call the campus police to remove a belligerent student from the classroom.  Both incidents, unsurprisingly, were over grades.

I feel vulnerable now, particularly if a situation ever escalates into a physical confrontation.  I am physically disabled and can’t put up much of a fight.  It’s very likely that the worst would be over before the police or even a student could intervene, and those are potential scenarios which don’t involve guns.   

Not much I can do about the conditions on the ground, though.  I’m hardly the first individual to become disillusioned with his chosen profession, even one which is steadily being deprofessionalized.  At least I have work lined up.  The days of summer are waning. 

In the meantime I’ll try to think happy thoughts…

© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar