I Teach (Or Try To)

For the last 34 years, I've attempted to teach English to students who, for the most part, do not want to learn English. Have you ever tried to teach a puppy to sit? The puppy has no desire to sit. The puppy wants to frolic, run, play with toys. The last thing a puppy wants to do is sit. It's pretty much the same trying to teach students English.

I started poorly. I was a French major in high school and for my first year and a half in college. Then French got really hard, as in even the footnotes in the books were in French. So I switched majors to Spanish, which had been my minor. By the time I graduated, Spanish had gotten really hard (ditto with the footnotes), so I took some time off, got married, had a baby, got divorced, had another baby, and thought about what I wanted to teach. There was never any question I was going to teach; both my parents were teachers, and whenever there was a blackboard around, my fingers ached for chalk. It was like a magnet—I had to go to the board and try to teach something to someone. Ask my poor cousin who I tried to teach algebra to when I was in ninth grade. She was in fifth or sixth and didn't have a clue. But I was bigger, so she sat through it. My brother and sister were spared, because we didn't have a blackboard at our house.

Everyone told me not to become an English teacher. English teachers are a dime a dozen, they said. You'll never get a job, they said. Did I listen? Of course not. I've never listened to anyone. I follow my dreams. I believe in myself. Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. It's so true. You'll never find a damned job. Oh, I worked. I got my masters by going to school part-time and studying while the kids were taking their naps and did very well, since the footnotes were in English. But in thirty-four years, I only worked full-time for four years, one year in one high school and three years in another. The rest of those years, I adjuncted at various community colleges, teaching a few classes here, a couple of classes there, commuting as many as 400 miles a week. We call ourselves "Roads Scholars," we adjuncts.

In case you don't know what an adjunct professor is, the original idea was a good one. In the beginning, a local lawyer, artist, writer, architect, etc., would come to the community college and teach a class as a professional in the field, able to give real life experience, as opposed to just book learning. It was a great idea.

Gradually, administrators (and probably full-time professors, too) saw another use for adjuncts. College enrollment fluctuates from semester to semester, year to year. Some semesters, there would be, especially in math and English, the core subjects, more students than the full-time professors could handle, so the department would hire adjuncts, temporary teachers to take up the slack. They were paid per class, not a salary, and they were not paid benefits, so they were pretty cheap, and if the following semester the student population was back down, the adjuncts didn't come back. It worked well for everyone (except the adjuncts, but they could move on and find full-time work somewhere else, maybe).

But somewhere along the way, administrators got the bright idea that adjuncts were so cheap that they could just let empty full-time positions stay empty and fill the spots with adjuncts instead, so that in one college where I taught, there were 20 full time professors and 50 adjuncts. We saved the college an enormous amount of money, and we had to be just as qualified. It wasn't like they just pulled anyone off the street to teach English classes. We just got paid less and didn't get benefits and were limited to two, three, or four classes per semester (depending on the college) so we couldn't be called full-time, and if there were no classes the next semester left over after the full timers got theirs, we were disposable. It wasn't the easiest way to make a living, especially when I ended up a single mother supporting two kids, but I loved teaching, and as long as I worked at two (sometimes three) colleges a semester, I made fairly decent money. And the nice thing was I walked in, taught my classes, and walked out. There was no involvement in the often petty politics in the department, politics so petty that they resulted in an actual fist fight at one meeting. Really. I wasn't there, so I don't know what it was about, but in an English department, it might have been over the conjugation of a verb or the Oxford comma. Although knowing that school, it could have been over a parking spot. Administration played full-timers against adjuncts, and adjuncts always lost.

So now I'm in another state and can't find a job. A masters degree and 34 years of experience and five applications have yielded nothing, and for the first time in 35 years, a fall has come with me not on a campus or two-facing classrooms of students, eager or resistant, looking at me. I miss it. I miss the paycheck, but more than that, I miss the sense of purpose, the sense of doing something important with my life. Where the commas go may not seem important to some people, but as I like to point out to my students, commas can save lives. There's a big difference between "Let's eat Grandpa before we go" and "Let's eat, Grandpa, before we go." Somewhere there are students who won't learn that this semester because I'm not there to teach them. I hope someone else gets through to them, or Grandpa's lunch.