Notes on the life of an adjunct instructor, and on the lives of her students
I am an adjunct English instructor at College of Southern Nevada, and I write what follows knowing full well that I may be fired, and not just for putting my name on it. This week I, a Jew, was (politely) scolded by my supervisor for not being politically neutral in class following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, at the urging of a conservative student and his parents. That came after another incident the week before, when the administration asked for my teaching availability. After answering, I did one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done: I typed my qualifications in all caps and begged my supervisor to allow me to teach one creative writing class. Even though I go without a paycheck in February, June, July, August, and September; even though I manage four classes and 100 students for roughly $1,800 per month after taxes, I realize that my all-caps anger was not unjustified, just misdirected. I should have addressed you, society at large, which sees no problem with the working conditions of teachers in this country.
“It’s not like you set her house on fire,” my brother Max advised. “Just apologize.” So I did. The only good that came out of my diva moment is that my supervisor did me the great service of elucidating my exact coordinates in the wilds of higher ed, which follow:
There are 67 full-time English instructors at the College of Southern Nevada. At least 10 of those instructors have doctorates. I am one of 25 adjuncts with an MFA degree, and there are at least 50 adjuncts with doctorates. Only about 10 full-time creative-writing teachers teach any creative writing courses because there is such a desperate need for composition instructors. More than 400 sections. The fact that I’ve published a bit and graduated from Emerson College means absolutely nothing in that context. I’m not telling you this to inspire pity; I’m just stating an objective fact I’ve only just recognized.
I say all this partly in response to a 2016 article which claimed that remedial students are often faced with the least-qualified professors. What it should say is “least-supported professors.” Most of my students can’t afford their textbooks, so I have to come up with my lectures on the fly, using media accessible to all. A few times, I’ve resorted to reading texts out loud. Most students were just punted from one of America’s worst school systems straight into my class with little knowledge of the language they speak. But they are all trying as hard as the circumstances of their lives will allow. And I am trying my best not to fail them, in spite of being set up to fail them.
After my divorce, after having worked as a glassblower, hotel maid, special-needs boarding-school teacher, barista, Batwoman impersonator, and every other job (except stripping/hooking), teaching was the last thing I wanted to do. But once I returned to Vegas from Boston, and my fantasy of becoming an antiquarian bookseller a la Johnny Depp in The Ninth Gate fell flat on its ass, adjuncting was my only option. I knew it was going to be rough; I just did not know how impossibly rough. Last year, to make up for late paychecks, I took jobs as a legal secretary, a cashier at an orchard, and a telemarketer for Flowershopping.com, which, I assure you, was even worse than it sounds. I don’t have a car, so I bum rides from my friend Amy to teach my classes. But Stephanie, what about Uber? Yes, but I don’t get paid enough to not have to make decisions between Ubering and eating.
This is a nationwide problem, by the way. Search “adjunct professor poverty,” and you’ll find story after story of part-time faculty who live near homelessness, depend on payday loans, and have very little security.
I come from a family of artists. Except for six years when my mom was not addicted to prescription meds and was making good money as an aesthetician at Bellagio, I grew up poor. Poor, but cultured. Books were the currency of our house. After my mom was fired, we lived off her 401(k), and once that ran out, every day was a high-wire act. We bounced from eviction notice to eviction notice, and depending on others to survive. Believe me when I say that I know what it’s like to grow up without a shot.
I do not, however, claim to know what it’s like to grow up like some of my students.
Once upon a time, I sat where my students sat. I was a 19-year-old high-school dropout when a teacher, Lee Barnes, plucked me out of class, told me I had talent worth pursuing, and changed my life. Perhaps this is why I didn’t deter a student from writing a profile on Jesus Christ, because God is all he has and I refuse to take that from him. This same student does not even have access to his memoir assignment because his mother didn’t like how she was portrayed and wouldn’t let him submit it. My background is why I didn’t fail the 60-year-old flat-earther who thought I was advocating violence against animals by introducing her to satire via David Thorne’s “Missing Missy” (Google it). It’s why I loan my only copy of my textbook to whatever student needs it, the latest being a girl who is trying to leave her boyfriend, struggling, as I have all my life, to find a space of her own to do the work being asked of her. It’s why I don’t take attendance — every student who shows up has fought to be there, just as fiercely as I fought to escape Vegas.
In academia, my siblings and I found support networks we did not know existed in high school, where everyone wrote us off as lost causes because of our severe anxiety and depression. Recently, things have come full circle. A teacher friend has invited me to sit in on her grad course in women’s nonfiction, so that I don’t completely lose my shit. Being a student again, I am, in spite of everything, still humbled by how sacrosanct the contract between teachers and students remains: the belief that someone can do something beyond their circumstance, the gifting of tools necessary for a person to contextualize themselves within the nation’s many histories. These are the things that wrench lives like mine out of their doomed trajectories.
Because I can introduce my students to some things, but not everything, the only hope I can glean from my classes is the energy shift I’m witnessing in them. Before it was disproven by Louis Pasteur, the theory of “spontaneous generation” dominated the natural sciences. It was the belief that living creatures could arise from nonliving matter. My students are dead to the world — numbers, blank checks, debt investments — but they persevere anyway, creating their own tools to spark change, inventing the genre of memes to deal with the existential crisis that is being twenty-something in this country. Though they’ve been left behind in “the America,” they are still becoming activists, to wrench third-wave feminism from the ivory tower and spread it to the masses, to bear witness to Rome as it burns, to generate the hope and ideas that will save what’s left of the world. They cannot do so without support. We cannot support them if all we have to teach them with are leftovers from burning the candle at both ends.