#but with teaching since I’m an adjunct I’m only getting 12 hours a week with that

[loveofmylouis]

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[thisisnotreallife]

Additive Identity

A job is not an identity, but it can start to feel like one if you aren’t careful about it.

In May, I quit my job teaching full-time at Washington State University and directing the Writing Center there. I didn’t so much as quit, I guess, as I did just never sign my annual renewal contract, deciding instead with Patrick to launch myself, himself, our cat, and all of our stuff across the country to Nashville, Tennessee without a job lined up—but with a sense of relief from escaping the nuclear waste zone of Richland, Washington and the mess of higher education, even if only momentarily.

Because we live in capitalism, I need a job, though, and so I decide I cannot be above throwing my name in the hat when a couple of tenure-track jobs come available at Nashville area community colleges. In the weeks and months since I applied, I haven’t been offered full-time work, but both colleges have reached out to offer adjuncting positions.  

Five hundred fifty dollars per credit for semester-long courses. No benefits or guarantees.

Three quarters of the nation’s college educator population is contingent labor. Part-time adjunct instructors are most often paid per credit, at rates that are disproportionately low compared to the compensation of full-time faculty. A full course load may be four courses each term, but an adjunct teaching three courses might make one-quarter the salary of a full-time faculty member. While tuition rises, more and more of the teaching duties are shopped out to contract workers who want desperately to teach, but who receive low pay and no benefits, and who often drive from one college to the next in a city to stitch together a $35,000 income. Many find out the next semester’s course load the day before or the day of the beginning of term, and if enrollment is low, there may not even be courses available. Post-graduate school, I spent four years adjunct teaching alongside full-time administrative support work, often grading student papers online during my lunch breaks and sending off covert applications for full-time teaching positions from company computers, hoping for a break.

To both adjuncting offers I receive when I arrive in Nashville, I impolitely decline. To the college that flew me out before our move for a finalist interview and campus visit and then neglected to follow up or respond to my inquiries, I send unsolicited student evaluations from the last several years.

You have made a mistake, I think I’m aiming to say—but now I’m not sure if I was saying it to the hiring committee or to myself.

In high school, I knew I wanted to be an English teacher, but it wasn’t until college that I decided I’d prefer post-secondary education to K-12. I liked the idea of not having to be in one spot for a seven-hour day. I liked the idea of having an office where most of your work got done, not a classroom full of desperately developing children for an entire day.

When I finally land a full-time teaching job, it is in a town of 16,000 people in a corner of Oregon that shows up as one of the darkest areas on a light pollution map of the contiguous United States. Friends from my graduate school cohort express surprise and disbelief not only that full-time teaching jobs exist, but that I managed to find one. I begin teaching. I serve on committees. I am asked to take on responsibilities by administrators who make double, triple, quadruple what I make. I sit in my office with my students as they talk, laugh, cry, tell me about their mental health concerns, drug abuse, gender identity issues. I stop writing. I stop baking bread. I write comments on student papers. Grade.

At the end of each semester, I breathe until I am ready to begin again.

The first place in Nashville to offer me a job is around the corner from our house, at a local favorite called Mike’s Ice Cream. I am told I will be making ice cream and eventually baking for the coffee shop connected to the ice cream factory. A half hour before my interview there, I am called by the Department Chair of the local community college where I was invited for the campus visit earlier that spring. She offers me an adjuncting opportunity, to “get my foot in the door” in the higher ed world of Tennessee. I am taken off guard and engage in pleasant conversation with her before promising to follow up via email, which I do—though not in the way either of us had expected.

At Mike’s Ice Cream, I am not making ice cream so much as I am doing manual labor: I follow recipe instructions to pour specific amounts of factory-made ingredients overhead into a machine from which I extract ice cream into boxes that I have made myself; I push 400-lb. racks of ice cream into freezers where it is possible to get stuck and die within 17 minutes; I stop counting OSHA violations by the end of my first shift.

I can’t keep up with the health code violations, either—fruit flies from the mildewy, open drain below the wash-rinse-sanitize sinks and from the laundry basket of rags used to mop up watered down ice cream mix swirl around my head while I extract, and one lands on the spatula I use to coax the frozen ice cream into the corners of the boxes. I watch a co-worker—another new hire, like me—toss an Oreo that fell on the floor over a container of cookies, in which it lands. He picks it out with his bare hands and scoops the Oreos he thinks it touched out with a measuring cup. Another co-worker, the soon-to-be college senior who is training us, refuses to wear a hairnet under her baseball cap and pivots from using her phone to food prep without washing her hands.

I last forty hours in total and make 325 gallons of ice cream that are distributed throughout the city of Nashville with my initials on them. I do not taste any of the flavors while I am there.

On my last day, I sustain a mild concussion when I slip on water in the kitchen and smack my face into a baker’s rack. I want to leave right away, when the lump on my cheekbone swells and turns a dark purple below the Band-Aid I have to put on over my broken skin. My head buzzes, but I finish out the shift and receive the following week’s schedule from my manager via email that evening.

I reply to tell him about the concussion, and that I cannot work until midnight on Monday night and then again at half past eight the next morning. He tells me he put a mat down where I slipped and that he’ll find someone to cover my Monday night shift, but when Tuesday morning comes around, I wake up at 6:00 and find that I’ve left my work shoes on the porch overnight during a hard rain.

When I send the email telling management at Mike’s that I won’t be coming back, I think of the student from several years ago who told me he didn’t have a draft of his essay because his dog ate it. I’m so sorry, but my shoes were wet.

We all have our limits.  

When we first moved to Nashville this May, I stacked the books from my office at WSU in the shed outside, on top of two filing cabinets full of assignment handouts and readings and writing samples. There is no room in our smaller house for them, and I expect I won’t need them in the fall, anyway. Our lease states that we use the shed at our own risk, mostly because it is not secure storage but also because it is apparently filled with spiders, who make themselves evident almost immediately, spinning webs between our rakes and tools and outdoor gear. It is a horrible, on-the-nose metaphor, but it is happening in real-time: the relics of my former, short-lived career gathering cobwebs in a dusty shed.

This September marks the first time since the year before kindergarten that I am unaffiliated with a school in some way, shape, or form. There is no back-to-school. There is no pre-term prep of syllabi and course materials. There is, of course, but I am not a part of it. I feel alienated from the routine set for me since my birth thirty-three years ago: a new year around the sun, a new year in school. But there are different ways to learn, I know, and different things to teach to the world, too.

“You are not your job,” my horoscope says. If my job is nothing, that means I am not nothing. If my job is not teaching, that means I am not not a teacher, too.  

[measuringlife]

Measuring Monday: Teaching 101

Teaching is my blood, both my parents were teachers and both of my mom’s parents were teachers. Truth be told I never set out to teach in any capacity, but destiny is funny like that.  

I found my way to teaching first in college where I started gravitating towards positions when I could “mentor” underclassman. Actually, that’s not true, I had a brief stint in high school where I taught CCD (Catholic education classes) for a year to first graders with my friend Heather. Nightmare, definitely solidified being a traditional K-12 teacher was not for me! So my college mentor role developed in co-teaching two interdisciplinary classes in grad school, both were highlights, but again I was drawn in through the leadership aspect more than the teaching. Two years later I taught a first-year college seminar, but that was the most “teaching” I did in like 5 years. Granted I was “leading” weekly 3 hour trainings for student leaders during that time, but again I never thought of it as teaching.

Suddenly I found myself at the helm of a whole course with 55+ sections of a first-year college transitions class and almost as many adjunct faculty to wrangle all while teaching a section myself. But it was during this time that I had my first real taste of experiential education, and in this case, it was through outdoor adventure curriculum. The learning that happened outside the class was even more powerful than anything that I could achieve in the classroom. One of my favorite “lessons” was on budgeting and decision making. We assigned students in small groups to meal plan for our trip. Each group probably got 2 meals to do. Each meal had a different amount budgeting to spend, so like breakfast was $4 per person, lunch was $6 per person, and dinner was $8 per person. The groups knew what meals they had to make and they were aware of the budget per person, but the trick was did the count all group members (including trip leaders, which one group forgot). What could they buy that could stretch the money out, what could be cooked with limited supplies on portable gas stoves? Were everyone’s dietary needs considered? Would the food be made at camp or did it need to be portable? So the groups needed to plan, shop and then cook. It was a real-life lesson and part of the well thought out curriculum that was cloaked in food shopping. In some cases they made too much food, others not enough food, went waaay under-budget or needed a last minute change because at the register they were over-budget. The processing the activity can sometimes be the best part.

Anyway, I taught another few years in traditional classroom settings, I even was hired to teach a 3-credit public speaking class, talk about traditional. I was really looking forward to the chance, but when I changed jobs HR needed me to resign my adjunct gig with my full-time gig, so I gave up the class months before it started. I toyed with picking up a first-year seminar class or a communications class at my current school, but for a whole host of reasons I didn’t. Then Urban Hiking found me.

A younger colleague of mine who I was Facebook friends with posted in Fall 2017 about being excited to be a first-time adjunct faculty and teaching an Urban Hiking class. I was excited for her excitement, but I was like Urban Hiking, tell me more. We chatted about it a few times over the course of the semester, I shared with her a bit about my outdoor education background. Well not too long after that she reached out to me letting me know she couldn’t teach in the Spring and wanted to refer me to her department chair. Next thing I knew I was brushing off my resume and interviewing for the gig which I got on the spot!

Teaching Urban Hiking last spring for the first time was a game changer. I was able to teach college students, be outdoors, and exercise. WINNING! This class is for 3 hours on Saturdays for 5 weeks and I was unsure about if it was worth the extra haul into DC. However, it quickly became my favorite part of the week. Not only was the class time itself great, but I loved reading the students reflections about each week’s hike and lesson. The class is designed to take students on various DC trails and introduce necessary hiking skills and concepts to hike for outdoor travel or as a recreational fitness activity. Content covers: fitness for hiking, route planning,  proper clothing and gear, safety concerns, and environmental conditions. I’m currently in my 3rd semester teaching Urban Hiking and it gets better and better. I’ve also spent the past two semesters mentoring the adjuncts who have taught the other second. Yup, the class was so popular that my department added a second section!

Recently I’ve gone and added the layer of Group Fitness Instructing which is such a different vibe. There are participants of all ages and abilities, those who are there to work out hard and those there to be more social. There is a sense of team and community, but also we are individuals all on our own journey, getting unique things from the workout. Lots of folks have asked me about my BODYPUMP teaching. In the Les Mills formats (which is the umbrella company out of New Zealand that are trainers that develop varieties of workouts) the instructors do the whole workout with the participants facing the class. We give verbal cues and we model the exercises. We stay at the front and try and give corrective cues as we go without calling out participants directly during class. There is so much going on from microphones to music to equipment, to knowing the choreography, getting the timing down, giving good cues, getting your mouth and brain to connect so you can say those cues, AND you are doing the entire workout while giving modifications, corrections, and most importantly praise and encouragement. Since I’m still a sub instructor I haven’t had the opportunity to develop too much rapport with the participants, but I’ve found myself subbing the same classes a few times now and that rapport is starting to develop.

Yesterday I fully co-taught a BODYPUMP class with my friend R. It was a blast to be teaching PUMP in my home gym. I’m co-teaching PUMP with J on Thursday and I’m stoked since I was a regular in that class. I’m also solo subbing at my home gym on the 17th and I can’t wait. The big dance will be when I get to sub a 10:25am Saturday class which is always packed and was a part of my weekend routine for a long time!

Call me a teacher, faculty, adjunct, instructor, professor whatever you want. I enjoy leading people and being seen as a resource.