On the Life and Frustrations of an Adjunct Professor
A personal reflection on teaching while homeless, college students' work ethic, and parents on the political warpath.
It’s another scorcher of a summer in the South! After half an hour outside, even in the shade, I’m sweating rivulets. The mosquitoes come out in force in the evenings. I’ve seen several cicada husks on the maple in the front yard, but only one live cicada.
Last week, with Octavia Butler’s Dawn and my false starts, I took a deep dive, maybe too deep — that reflection stretched, didn’t it? So I’m tapping the brakes now, writing as if in my journal, giving folks freshly joining this party a chance to catch up. I think I’ll make this weekend post available for everyone, free or paying subs…
I’m hanging my hat right now in Columbia, South Carolina, where I’m house-sitting for a friend of a friend and waiting tables — a gig I’ve come back to time and again over the years to make ends meet. Restaurant work doesn’t pay well — with inflation these days, I think it pays worse than ever — but it’s better pay than I got last year as a college English instructor. I love to teach, but I believe the profession is gravely on the ropes. Once, the burdens of teaching were only low pay and long hours. Public school teachers were at least respected by their communities, valued and thanked for caring about young people’s education, character, and well-being. Now teachers are attacked, dragged through the mud, lambasted by politicians, often for caring. As the dividends for teaching grow smaller, many teachers are fleeing the classroom.
Funny — for how often I hear “it’s a crime how our society treats teachers,” precious few Americans seem willing to stand up and do something about it!
It’s worse yet for America’s many adjunct (or “contingent”) professors, like me, who typically work on part-time contracts with no benefits. Most people don’t realize what our lives are like. Their picture of a college professor is a middle-aged man dressed in tweed pontificating from a lectern. They don’t know more than half of all American college instructors are not on the tenure track. So, here’s a more realistic picture: the last six months I taught college, I was homeless, lived in my campus office, ate ramen and microwave meals until I was sick of the stuff, and slept on a blow-up mattress. I might have taken another job, probably waiting tables, but only if I gave my students less than my best efforts and my utmost attention — and I never do that.
I take teaching very seriously. For instance, when I teach freshman composition, my goal is nothing less than preparing students as comprehensively as possible for four years of college-level research and writing. I don’t teach by rote, either. I improve my curriculum and pedagogy as I teach, every semester. I invest time in getting to know my students, personalizing feedback and advice, befriending them and helping them find their feet in college. When I teach, I work my ass off. Many profs do.
At a community college — where I last taught — many students need the support I’m determined to offer. Many work jobs as they go to school, and a few are their families’ breadwinners. Some are first-generation college students with no one in their families to turn to for advice about what to expect of college, what they must do to succeed, and what kinds of opportunities they should look and plan for further down the road. So I consider offering that advice part of my job. A few students come from broken or troubled families with problems they’re just trying to escape — addiction, criminality, imprisonment, legacies of despair and suicide. These students in particular work their asses off, too. They know what’s at stake for them. I realize as a prof I’m not paid to be a social worker, but I can’t help doing whatever I can for these students.
They put some university students I’ve taught to shame. Another common stereotype nowadays is the entitled brat skating through college happy-go-lucky on their parents’ dime. I’m here to tell you this is a lie. I’ve taught at all levels of public college — at a flagship university, a mid-level university, a community college. Only at the flagship did I encounter the entitled brat — even there, as the exception, not the rule. Maybe private schools and the Ivy League are a different matter, but far-and-away most of the college students I’ve ever taught are levelheaded, hardworking people not looking for a “safe space” or hiding out from life. Part of the reason I have the work ethic I do as a professor is because I’ve seen their work ethic as students.
But let’s talk about “safe spaces” and the like… Another common trope, especially with those politicians lambasting teachers, is the accusation that we indoctrinate students. No, it’s just the reverse. You — their parents and family members, and to a wild extent their churches and faith leaders — indoctrinate them, and we’re left with the onerous task of undoing the damage you’ve done. You fill their heads with unsupported ideas, even evil ideas. They come to us from childhoods littered with conversations in which you “shot the shit,” voicing casual, narrow-minded, poorly evidenced suppositions and guesses about the world and its people, in some cases deliberate, outright bigotry.
But that’s not what galls me. That’s just people being people.
What really galls me is that, after eighteen years of cramming your kids’ heads full of the most outlandish nonsense imaginable, you send them off to college to be educated and then you get up in arms and come after us for educating them. How dare you?!
What’s the real culprit here? I believe too many parents are suffering under the false and unhealthy assumption that their children should become carbon copies of them. So their kids come home from their first semester or year of college with a lot of new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of thinking — and the parents see red. And seeing red, they entirely overlook the fact that it’s been twenty years or more since they went off into the world and found out a few things their parents didn’t know, and the world has moved on in that time, changed.
“After all the effort I put in raising this kid,” they think, “who’s this numskull telling my kid the world isn’t just the way I said it was? Just who do all these professors think they are to gainsay me with my own kid?!”
Well, if that’s the way you see it, here’s a newsflash:
You don’t own your child.
Your child is a person, distinct and different from you. Your job as a parent was never to turn your child into you. It is natural for your child to grow away from you. Indeed, it’s what you should want, even if you don’t understand it.
Practically every parent says, to the point of cliché, “I want my child to have a better life than I’ve had.” If you agree with that sentiment, then don’t you want your child in some way to be a better person than you are, too? Don’t you want your child to know more than you know? To see farther than you see? To carry forward every good thing you’ve taught them to do and to be — and even more?
Here’s an observation, purely anecdotal: in all my years as a college student, a master’s degree candidate, and an adjunct professor — in nearly a quarter of a century scooting like a shuttlecock from one institution of higher education to another — every single professor I’ve ever known was, in my estimation, a good and admirable person. Some were hard-nosed and gave me hell, but even with the most trying of professors, I could always see their hearts were in the right place. They were committed to passing on the knowledge and insights accrued over centuries of human inquiry. More than that, they were committed to making their students aware, curious, skeptical, sharp-eyed. More than that, they were all keen to see their students become good and admirable people, too, and they understood this meant they were not in the business of indoctrination — rather, they were liberating students from indoctrination, which meant students could question, could voice doubts, could push back. I’ve met conservative profs and liberal profs, those forthright about their personal views and those who felt their personal views had no place in the classroom. But I’ve never met a professor who thought their views were sacrosanct, who acted as if they were “laying down the law” for students.
The best professors know what it means to learn from their students. I’m just a lowly adjunct, but whenever I teach, I’m proud to be part of this profession.
But if my experience means nothing to you, or if you’ve got an unshakable case of the ass about some wild-eyed notions your kid came home from college with, well, here’s a final suggestion for you. Talk to your kid. Engage them on the subjects. Debate with them about what their professors are telling them. Fight your battles on the grounds of the ideas and their merits, the arguments and evidence for or against them. Instead of politically undermining your children’s education, take part in it.
Who knows, you might learn something. (Is that what you’re so afraid of?)
Whew! I’ve wanted to get that spiel out, in one forum or another, for a long time!
In closing, how about some music? First, of course, I want to toot my own horn again about placing a song in The Museum of Americana. Next, I want to give a shout-out to long-time friends Rob Hinkal, Kristen Jones, and Heather Aubrey Lloyd, who are each greatly talented in their own rights but together form a powerhouse to front the folk metal band ilyAIMY (“i love you And I Miss You”). Ye Olde Folk throwback that I am, I never thought I’d come to love a band calling themselves “metal,” but life is weird. If you want an easy and charming introduction, listen to “Natural 20”: