Identity and Anonymity

After a discussion with a friend yesterday, I realized that I need to update my blog. I also realized that I left the last blog with a promise of a journey that had yet to start. So, I know it’s time to put away the excuses and begin to walk down the path I promised I would begin. So, the question is: what exactly is an adjunct instructor.

Simply put, an adjunct instructor is a contract employee who only job is to teach his/her subject matter. That is, we prepare the curriculum and execute it. We are not asked to publish, perform administrative tasks related to college infrastructure, or serve on committees. We may perform these tasks at our discretion. I’m hoping to include more of those duties on my list as I become familiar and comfortable with my current position.

Yet, the most interesting tension that has arisen out of my experience as an adjunct thus far is: how should my students address me? Some of my students, mostly likely fresh out of high school, refer to me as Mr. Leff. I’m not completely comfortable with that title, but I understand it creates some separation between the teacher and student. Others, who have been out of school for a while, tend to call me professor. In some ways, I think having a “professor” entitles the student to legitimize his/her education. It’s not just a regular school; this is higher ed. Although I like the title, I’m not sure I’m quite worthy of it. I say this because I have a lot of respect for long journeys full-time, tenured track faculty endured to reach their positions. Additionally, I haven’t subjected myself to the rigor of a doctoral degree. While that confers the letters d and r in front of person’s name, I also think it grants those individuals a flexibility to be considered master teachers, experts in a discipline that I associate with the word professor. I haven’t reached the master teacher or expert status yet. Despite my instinct to simply have my students call me Aaron, I haven’t named or corrected the way in which they should address me. (Except for one e-mail with the salutation hey buddy, but that’s a whole different story.)

To bring this back to the question what is an adjunct, I’m not sure that I can really define it, because I have yet to define exactly what it means to me. Statistically, I know that adjuncts make up 80% of all teaching faculty at my institution. I also know through various discussions with some administrators that given funding for higher ed in this state, community colleges and other public four-year institutions cannot afford to hire enough tenured track faculty cover all the courses the colleges need to offer to meet the demands of the student body due to the full-time benefits afforded those positions. So, the colleges hire contract employees to meet the student demand. Ultimately, I will simply define those who have made a career out of contract instruction as people who have a burning desire to teach.

Swimming in a sea of papers

This week my students turned in their first drafts of a narrative. Unlike my previous experience of teaching comp, I am working on hammering home the revision process. Students first composed a narrative for peer review, which seemed more like an opportunity for them to read each other’s work and introduce them to other points of view as opposed to getting substantial feedback. So, I asked them to revise their narratives based on the comments they received from their peer editors, and turn in another draft to me for my comments. Ultimately, they will turn in a portfolio with 3 drafts of the same work. I am hoping that this process will show them how their writing improved or changed composing one assignment. I’m interested to see how this works from my perspective meaning I’ll have to read 100 narratives twice. I figure, I will complete roughly 66 hours of commenting before I return the “final draft” with a grade. I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed with this right now as a lot of my students are ESL, and I’m still trying to put my finger on a best practice in addressing issues in their papers. So it goes…
For my next entry, I want to turn my attention to two important comments some of my friends have made about my blog thus far: the question of anonymity and airing dirty laundry, and defining adjunct. The former comes from direct comments on my blog, and the latter from a discussion I had with a friend of mine who ask me what adjuncting means. I look forward to thinking and writing about those questions some more when I’m not swimming in a sea of narratives.

Beware the cynics

I love teaching. I love the stage, and more importantly the captive audience. As a kid, I pictured myself making a sold-out audience roll in the aisles until their sides burst. However, as time wore on, I realized I wasn’t that funny. I can’t retell jokes very well; I am too lazy to write a script, and now when I write, I have a tendency to take myself too seriously. Teaching, on the other hand, gives me the opportunity to write a minimal script, riff off student comments, and more importantly, I know they will (coerced perhaps) come back for the next show. Now that I am a fledgling adjunct instructor at an “inner-city” community college, I feel that my love of teaching is being put to the test. It’s not the content that makes me discontent, but rather I worry about my current position providing the economic stability needed to maintain a feeling of control beyond the classroom.
In my three short weeks working at this institution, I talked to many professional adjuncts. Some have done this for as many as 17 years. They tell me stories of teaching a couple of classes here, another couple of classes there, and working a dean to sign approval for overload at another institution. I gather adjuncting creates gypsy academics, selling their talents to various academic communities, adjusting their syllabi to meet the rhetoric of the particular institution, and moving on. While these professionals talk about the relative freedom, I can’t help but notice a tongue-in-cheek cynicism coloring their commentary about their academic and teaching interest. I recall one conversation in particular where one of my fellow adjuncts described a new book she was being required teach. I asked her if it was a good book, and she replied that she doesn’t know, the students have to read it not her. This scares me.
Throughout my professional career, I gravitated towards the cynics. When I didn’t have much power, in terms of determining policy governing me, I found myself speaking out of the corners of my mouth decrying the shortsighted people around me. I can foresee commiserating with other adjuncts about how people in the trenches never receive adequate compensation for their effort. I don’t want this. I need to find some other anchor to compliment the joy I get from standing in front of the class and working out revision plans for first year, and in most cases first generation, college students. If I don’t I fear this blog, and more importantly my family life, will be about looking for an affordable two-dollar cup of coffee.

What should I assess?

What I should I really assess?

During my first week of classes, I gave a simple writing assessment to ensure that the students enrolled in ENG 121 were ready to be initiated into academic discourse. The prompt given across every section of the course was: “Why are you attending college?” The criteria for evaluating the essay was plain:
focused main idea,

• reasons that support the main idea,
• details supporting the reasons,
• a clear conclusion
• demonstrate a good understanding of sentence structure

For the most part, students composed decent essays. They all used the question to jump-start their essay, and they used some variation the five-paragraph-essay format, which, I imagine, has been reiterated in their English coursework since late-elementary school. Of course, many of the essays pointed out some glaring weaknesses in maintaining control of their ideas and understanding the function of punctuation. These weaknesses gave me hope as I could begin to tailor future instruction to meet their needs. However, a majority of the essays demonstrated a logical fallacy I’m not sure I can correct, or for that matter dare to discuss with my students: getting an education equals getting a high paying job.
The claim getting an education enables one to get a higher paying job is not without its merits. A lot of jobs, especially first “professional” jobs, require applicants have a degree. Some of even specify what type of degree an applicant should have. But beyond the qualifications posted on monster.com, Craig’s List, or in the local newspaper’s classified section, the idea of a degree equaling financial success has been a part of our collective rhetoric. I am not surprised that these fresh, excited faces enter college banking on the idea that there is a pot of gold at the end of the commencement speech.
In some form or another, I feel a responsibility to nurture that belief. I am, after all in my professional capacity, a representative of higher education. I want to appeal to the students that learning to write effectively will lead them to the goals, and attending college is an important step in enriching their lives. Yet, I cannot help feeling somewhat uneasy letting the belief that education equals monetary success go without questioning that statement. I mean, I have a graduate degree and, much like my students, I am wondering, as the title of this blog suggests, if I have enough money in my bank account to indulge in a two-dollar cup of coffee.
Granted, many of the students enrolled in my classes were not expected to move beyond a high school education. During my interview for my position, my department chair told me that these students are not your typical suburban students I worked with as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the “Research 1” university where I got my training. In fact, he said, “when we do get those students, we wonder: what are they doing here?” Using his comment as a reference point, I was not surprised when the themes that a degree could be a panacea to the woes of poverty, immigration status, and familial indifference appeared in many of the essays. However, their addendum that the degree would minimally ensure financial success, while logically supported, left me wondering if I didn’t challenge that assumption, could I be perceived as a snake-oil salesman when they didn’t pull upper-five to six figures after graduation?
Ultimately, I believe education and more specifically higher education is a place that fosters critical awareness. A place where students and teachers nuance their understanding of world, challenge simple answers, and reap the rewards of finding something. Technical and material skills are secondary. However, maybe we need logical fallacies and pre-determined answers such as a degree equals a high paying job to drive us to learn and hopefully thrive in the world of education where the mechanics of learning are not always visible or material. I know that I hold the belief that this position, despite the meager financial compensation, will forward my career and eventually grant some more material benefits in the future. So, until I can move beyond providing my students with the necessary toolkit to write well in this environment, I will allow simple answers to the complex question: “Why are you attending college?”