For Labor Day, a very long post on the adjunct life...
*******
I’ve been teaching for about 15 years now at the university level. I have taught at community colleges and R-1 institutions; online and in-person; graduate and undergraduate; music majors and non-majors; first-generation, honors, and adult students. At Texas Tech, I earned tenure and promotion to associate professor. I left that job for a variety of reasons and relocated to Tacoma where I began adjuncting at the University of Washington and its branch campuses.
I never really wanted to be a teacher: I was hoping I could just sit around, drinking coffee all day, thinking and writing about music. Turns out there aren’t an awful lot of jobs like that (at least, that don’t involve teaching). I decided that since I was going to be a teacher, I should probably get good at it. I took a music theory pedagogy class in my graduate program (for which I’m eternally grateful) and eventually started teaching that class myself at TTU. I regularly attended events at the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center to improve my teaching: eventually, I was asked to join their advisory board. After a few years of involvement with the Honors College at Texas Tech (it turns out I really liked teaching, and was trying to do more of it!) I was named Honors College Professor of the Year in 2011.
I’m a pretty good teacher. Not great—I know a lot of great teachers, and will happily recognize those who outshine me—but good. I suppose it’s because I care.
I don’t make a lot of money as an adjunct. I split my time between UW Tacoma and the main campus in Seattle (about an hour’s commute one way, if I’m lucky). I typically teach two or three courses a quarter during the regular school year; two summer courses at UWT; and an early fall start class in Seattle. If I’m lucky.
I’ve been lucky. This teaching schedule allows me to live, earn benefits, accrue retirement, and provide for my kiddo. I have a mortgage, student loan, and credit card debt. I recognize that there are many—in academia and elsewhere—who are not as lucky as I am. I’ve managed to do okay in this business in part because I’m a white, cis-het male who enjoys the privileges that come with that.
I’ve had to deal with a wide variety of circumstances in my classrooms over the last few years. I had a fight break out in my rap class several years ago (a vet with PTSD was triggered by a student comment; when another student intervened, he got hit). I had student who missed quite a few classes because he had to go to court and fight to keep his family—most of whom didn’t speak English—from being evicted. I had a student whose mom moved her and her siblings to a hotel room in the middle of the night to escape an abusive father. It pains me to hear these stories, and I do what I can to help. I’m truly touched that my students trust me enough to share these circumstances with me. One student said that I was the only professor that she thought she could trust.
When students confide in me, I do my best to help them out. I can’t offer them a place to stay, nor can I cover their groceries for a week, or whatever. But I can—and do—listen. When UWT first offered active shooter training, I signed up right away (this was close on the heels of the rap class incident). I’ve taken CPR and first aid training (partially for just life in general, partially because I have a kiddo, and partially for teaching). I have food and housing insecurity statements on my syllabi. I do my best to care for and about my students. But it’s hard, and getting harder.
I was recently thumbing through Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do, a book that I read many years ago when I had time to read pedagogy stuff. One of the “best college teachers” spent three hours in his office with a student who claimed they didn’t understand calculus. Another created elaborate case studies which he assigned to groups and, after each group presentation, he took them all out to dinner.
I don’t have an office of my own: there is one shared office at UWT for all of the part-time faculty (how is this not a FERPA issue?), and I share an office with the French horn professor (and all of his students and their horns and music and tuxedos and coffeepots…) in Seattle. I have six books in there. I wish I could spend three hours explaining music theory to a student who doesn’t get it, but I have to get on the train so that I can get back to Tacoma to pick up my daughter by 6:00 so that I might get to spend some time with her that night. I’d love to take groups of my students out for dinner, but I don’t have an expense account or a six-figure salary (or the extra time…). Does this make me not a great teacher?
Put more simply, it seems that being a great teacher requires a lot of resources: resources that many teachers (and/or institutions) simply don’t have.
Lately, I’ve been feeling like my teaching has gotten a little stale. I picked up a copy of John Bean’s Engaging Ideas, and it’s wonderful. I’m trying some things in my classes already. I’ve been thinking lately about what a pedagogy that’s truly rooted in hip hop might look like: maybe elements of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Christopher Emdin’s For White Folks who Teach in the ‘Hood, and other books. But these books (and all the other ones I want to read) cost money, and it takes time to read them.
(Sure, I could get them from the library, perhaps, but then I can’t write in them, bookmark the pages, grab them off the shelf when I need them… And I do have some time to read, on the way to Seattle, perhaps, when I’m not prepping lessons, or when I’m done grading, which—lately—I’ve just decided to stop doing at 10:30 p.m., whether I’m done or not. I have about 100-150 students a quarter, and have to write my own lesson plans—most of which are off-the-cuff these days—and lesson plans for my TAs in Seattle.)
The more I think about it, the more I think I’m not getting paid enough to be a good teacher. I don’t have the resources I need to improve my craft, or to share with my students. So I just keep doing what’s comfortable (which, frankly, isn’t half bad at this point in my career).
Oh—I don’t really do research anymore. Staying abreast of developments in the field is important, certainly, but it’s not officially part of my job, so I don’t do it. I won’t perish if I don’t publish. More on this later.
All of this really hit home to me when a student recently confided in me that they had for the last year been in a difficult relationship with another student who happened to be in this class, and they didn't feel comfortable attending anymore. We worked out a plan by which they could complete the course without attending the last three weeks or so (it was pretty far into the quarter, and this student had generally been pretty good). I thanked the student for confiding in me, and assured them that I wouldn’t say anything to anyone (unless I was approached as part of a formal investigation, an action they decided to pursue). I encouraged them to reach out to me and I could point them in the direction of resources on campus, if needed.
After the student left, I thought sadly, “I don’t get paid enough to deal with this.” Not long after that, another student in a different class confided in me that they had missed so many classes because they were going through a divorce. Another good student; another plan to complete the class successfully.
As I said earlier, being a great teacher requires a lot of resources: resources that many teachers (and/or institutions) simply don’t have.
*******
A few years back, I gave a presentation on form and narrative in rap music at the Texas Society for Music Theory conference. I was very pleased with the paper—even if the crowd was ready for lunch and I had to trim about 10 minutes on the fly—and spent a year turning it into an article, which I submitted to a Prestigious Journal.
Attending conferences is an important way to get your name and your work out there. At this point in my life, though, I mostly go to conferences to visit with friends and see new places. I have a pretty good acceptance rate at regional conferences; I’ve given two papers at the national Society for Music Theory conference, but have basically given up on submitting to them for a lot of reasons (which I won’t bore you with here).
Going to a conference involves flying to a city, getting a hotel room for a night or two or three, transportation, meals, conference registration, etc. In other words, it’s expensive. Many universities have some travel money to support scholars who are presenting at these conferences. Typically it doesn’t cover the full amount: for the national conference, the hotel is usually a swanky downtown Hilton at $250-300/night; conference registration is $200; etc. but it helps. These funds, though, are often unavailable to adjuncts, and typically reserved for those who are presenting, not just going to, say, plug their new rap book to anyone who will listen. All of this is to say I can’t really go to conferences that often. The last conference I went to was in Vancouver, B.C., which is right up the road from me.
At any rate, I waited a few months to hear that the article was rejected (somewhat unfairly, I think). Did I mention that a previous article on hip hop in that journal included a reference to “Tupack Shakur and Biggie Small?”
At that moment, I decided that, since research wasn’t a part of my appointment—I’m only hired to teach—I would no longer write for free. I tried to think how I could make money writing. I write for small local magazines and other outlets. Maybe I’ll write a book? An academic book won’t make a lot of money, but it will bring prestige. A textbook seemed like an ideal money-making opportunity, but when it comes to tenure and promotion, textbooks and other pedagogical materials often don’t “count” as much as journal articles or academic books.
[A brief aside: when I was at TTU I submitted a chapter of my dissertation to a journal for publication consideration. I didn’t hear from them for two years, despite repeated e-mails, phone calls, getting my advisor to pull rank, and conversations with at least two presidents of the regional society. Eventually I just sent them an e-mail that said “I’m withdrawing my paper from consideration.” Good thing I wasn’t counting on that for tenure. Oh wait—I was.]
Don’t get me wrong: the textbook was hardly “all about the Benjamins,” but that was a strong motivator. When friends asked me what the title was going to be, I said half-jokingly, “Edie’s College Fund.”
So I wrote a textbook, and I’m very proud of it. I wrote it while I was adjuncting full time. I had no sabbatical, no grants, no nothing. Most of the academics that I reached out to were “too busy” to offer feedback on a chapter; one offered to read a chapter if I would either pay her or list her as a co-author. This person is an assistant professor at UW Tacoma—a colleague—who has a certain amount of job security that I don’t. I understand wanting to get paid, but there was no way I was listing this person as a co-author for reading one chapter. I guess I just assumed this is the kind of thing colleagues did for one another…
My book costs $65. I feel slightly bad that it’s that much, but I had nothing to do with setting the price. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, but I don’t know that I would make my students buy it. Although I did this past summer because, given the way my situation is going, I’m not sure I’ll be able to teach from it again. And I made sure that they had access to a hard copy on reserve at the library, and an electronic version through the library web site as well.
I guess where I’m going with all of this is: a) a research agenda requires lots of time and money; b) adjuncts are often excluded from this aspect of the game (and—let’s face it—it is a game); c) this exclusion limits their opportunities to get tenure-track jobs, most of which value teaching and research equally. Those jobs include a service component, too, which is another piece missing from many adjuncts’ CVs, although I have to say that I haven’t been to a faculty meeting in seven years and I’m totally fine with that.