I love my job. I really do.
And I know I’m lucky to have it. The competition for jobs like mine is fierce, far more fierce than it was twenty years ago when I was first hired with a newly-minted MS and a year of adjunct work.
I teach English at a community college in a state that ranks near the bottom in education, both in spending and achievement. My colleagues and I knew that coming in, but most of us stick with it because we’re committed to the ideals of open access and social mobility. Many of us see our work as subversive, providing a good education to students who haven’t had a lot of breaks, whether through losing the birth lottery or an increasingly unforgiving economic system. My stronger students are as good as those at the selective university where I first did graduate work, but we have far more unprepared students who know they need to work hard to be brought up to speed. We also have slackers, but no educational institution is free of that attitude. Most of ours aren’t surly, at least.
But most days I don’t like my job very much.
Though I have just over two decades of teaching experience, my veteran colleagues and I spend an inordinate amount of time in meetings and trainings to sell us the Next Big Thing.
Our library has been gutted to make room for more computers for underprepared students because the legislature has decided it doesn’t want to fund remedial and developmental coursework anymore. Quiet study spaces are disappearing in the push to get more students in front of a computer screen.
More adjuncts, of course. Most are great, but the demand is so high and the pay so low we have to settle for some who shouldn’t be in a classroom. I hear the stories from their former students.
Thanks to non-stop testing in public schools, my students seem more helpless every semester. They were drilled in nothing but the five paragraph theme, so research projects leave them baffled. There’s only so much that can be covered in a fifteen week comp course, but increasingly they’re coming in as blank slates.
And the testing and accountability mania that left them in this condition? It’s now working its way up to us. Our academic freedom is being chipped away by requirements we add this or that trendy element to our classes, and our time is being sacrificed to paperwork/training/meetings to demonstrate our acquiescence to these demands.
Our jobs are seen as “content delivery,” as if a college education is no more than a logistical system of transferring information from Point A to Point B. If a student is frustrated, it’s because we’re doing something wrong, not because frustration is an inevitable part of overcoming challenges. If a student fails, it’s because we created a “barrier to student success.” Those elements that were once considered a legitimate goal of a college education – setting goals, working through obstacles, working independently, building on previous knowledge, taking responsibility – are now either being back-burnered or openly sacrificed in the name of “student success.”
The experience my long-time colleagues bring to our profession is seen as an obstacle to progress, and we’re told our resistance to change is because we want to make things easier on ourselves.
Most of my students know they’ve been ill-served in the past and they know they’re being held back by a push to gear classes toward the least prepared. Now that our funding depends on how many students graduate, there’s little institutional incentive to challenge those who will make it through no matter what we do. We talk about this in class, and their resentment comes through in their stories about being given Power Points that are drawn verbatim from the text, about other students who simply don’t read the assignments, and about being treated like children.
It’s all wearing me down. Maybe I’m just tired because I’m getting older, but I haven’t felt this discouraged for this long until the past couple of years. I used to wonder why anyone would retire from this job, and planned on keeling over in the traces when my time came.
Now I understand. It's hard to watch the slow death of so much of what I love about my profession.
WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?