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