Category Archives: The University

Annoying Sophomores

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

But over the weekend, the sophomore problem started bugging me again in multiple ways.  I had all those sophomores partly because the Writing Program didn’t have enough money to teach all the Freshpersons who were supposed to take the course.  Or to put it another way, even if every class had been completely filled with nothing but Freshpersons we did not offer enough classes to take all of the Freshpersons who were supposed to take the course in the year—the Freshperson year—that they were supposed to take it.  Some of the sophomores in my class might have actually tried to get in the course but couldn’t find an empty spot.  So here they were slopped over into my class. plethora

Also quite logically and correctly, no doubt, I assume that most of these sophomores had not tried very hard.  The people who wanted really to get into Writing 2 were people who requested the course on what is called the first pass through the computer system.  But most of these people had probably requested the course on their third pass and of course—what do you know?—but no spots were available. They didn’t want a spot most likely because they had failed the writing placement exam.

That meant as entering Freshpersons, the year before they got into my class, they had not been eligible to take Writing 2 but had to take Writing 1 that is the course a person has to take if they fail the writing placement exam.  Most students do not like failing a writing test and then have to take and also to pay for (and at one time get no graduation credit for) a course to make up for failing the test.  The test is a really stupid test, but the people who flunk it, at least half of them, do not write as well as the people who pass it.  They probably did not pass it because they lacked confidence as writers or were hung over.  So they fail the test and their confidence is further reduced, and then they take Writing 1 which makes them feel stupid or like they have the small pox and their confidence is further reduced.

Consequently by the time they get to my class the very idea of a writing class—and the potentials for humiliation and embarrassment implicit in it (not to mention the horror of a bad grade)—has put them in a pretty rancid mood.  Also the sophomores know as well as I do that the course is for Freshpersons.  Right there in the catalogue it says, “Writing 2 Introduction to Academic Writing.”  And during that Freshperson year when they should have been taking Writing 2 they were “introduced” or perhaps “smacked over the head” with Academic Writing in one of those General Education Courses they didn’t want to take either, but had to because they are required.  Some feel resentment at having to receive a brush up course on an introduction they have already experienced in the concrete form of a low grade.

Already, I suspect they are seeking compensatory structures, as I call them, to hide or muffle their inadequacies as writers. So off I go, “And don’t ever use that thing…What’s it call the thsaraous (I pretend I can’t pronounce Thesaurus).  Yea…that thing.  I know, even though I am old, that they have that thing on computers now.  But never use it. Never, ever use a big word when a simple one will do.  Why use ubiquitous when you can use every where.  Tell me, why the hell would you do that except to impress somebody with your knowledge of big words? What are you trying to do?  Make somebody else feel stupid?  Are you an elitist or something? Well, I am not stupid, I am not an elitist, and I am not impressed.  Also, I want you to know I just hate the word, ‘plethora.’”

Fired

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

One morning in May or early June I walked into the English Department mail room and there’s an official letter in my box that says, “We are happy….”  When they start off like that usually firedsomething good was in the letter, and there was because they were happy to offer me one of those self-terminating contracts for the upcoming year.  A couple of other Visiting Lecturers were in there checking their mail too, and one, a lady I liked, opened her letter and turned red and put her hands over her eyes and walked out, and another guy gave a grunt, sort of like he had been hit in the stomach, and walked out.

Turns out their letters had not started with “We are happy…,” but with whatever words people use as the lead into “You are fired…”  Over fifty percent of the Visiting Lecturers—and there were a good 30 of us by that time—had been fired.  And nobody knew why either because the Department with its four years and out rule were under no obligation to tell you why you were fired.  Hell, they had done more than they were legally required to do by just telling us we had been hired.  Or fired.

And for weeks nobody could look anybody in the eye because nobody knew who had been fired and who hadn’t and it was too damn awkward to ask, unless the person happened to be a friend.  Because whatever the reason might have been for the mass firing, everybody knew that somebody had sat in an office, made a list of the Visiting Lecturers, and then drew a line between the hired and the fired.  The hired being good enough to continue; the fired not being good enough for whatever unknown reasons.  So if you told somebody you were fired, you were just a loser, and if you told somebody you were hired, you probably were a kiss-ass suck up who had cultivated the right connections or fucked the boss.

I spent hours talking to the people who had not been hired.  I couldn’t leave the place. On the way out to the parking lot, I would walk by the office of a fired person and lean in and ask them how they were doing, and end up sitting there listening to them lament and both of us chewing things over to figure out what had happened for hours at a time.

 I began to realize that something was out of whack in my response to the situation.  I really didn’t feel good about getting rehired; I honestly didn’t feel any sort of secret glee or inward sense of superiority.  I felt terrible.  Maybe it was the survivor syndrome or something.  Like everybody on the airplane dies in the crash, but you and you go around saying, “Why me, Lord?”  And given my complete lack of self esteem or self worth that was a hard question to answer unless God was just an arbitrary jerk.  This event precipitated a form of life-crisis that led me to seek the aid of a psychotherapist.

 As it turns out though, the event was a non-event.  Everybody by the middle of the summer was rehired.  As it turned out, the money for funding us was slow coming down the bureaucratic pike.  Whoever the boss was knew the money was more than likely coming down the pike.  But we were Visiting Lecturers so nobody had to explain anything to us, and firing a bunch of us was a good way to remind everybody: your contract is self-terminating.

Visiting Lecturer

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I was lucky while I looked for work elsewhere to have a full time job as a teacher of writing at a university.  I was not a true faculty member—one with tenure and the right to vote on issues of faculty governance—but something called a Visiting Lecturer.  In the academic manual this position cyclopswas described vaguely in a couple of lines.  Actually none of us Visiting Lecturers were Visiting, so what “visiting” really meant was temporary.

NThe university started using this position a great deal in the early 80s because they had become tenure “heavy.”  The problem with tenure, for the institution, is that a huge chunk of money is locked into one person for the entire working life of that person.  If you are tenure heavy you have too much money locked in too far into the future for too many people, so that the university is like a giant with shackles around its ankles.  It can’t move without falling all over itself.

So to achieve a degree of fiscal flexibility, the U. started hiring temps on year to year contracts.  That’s what a Visiting Lecturer was.  A temp.  We were given what were officially called, in the letter telling us we had a job, “self-terminating” contracts.  Self-terminating.  Sort of like a contract that commits suicide at the end of a fiscal year.  In practice, this meant that at the end of a year you were to assume you had been terminated, unless you heard otherwise.

One was not to expect a letter indicating one had been terminated or certainly nothing to explain why one had been terminated.  Rather one was simply to assume one had been terminated at the moment one signed the contract.  If one did not receive a letter saying one had another self-terminating contract one was simply to disappear into the sunset.

Also the Visiting Lecturer was to understand that after he or she had received four such self-terminating contracts one was terminated.  The fourth contract was the terminal self-terminating contract. When one’s fourth contract had terminated, one was to pack up and disappear into the sunset because no further contracts would be forthcoming.

Why four years and not five or six years?  One might ask if one has one of those self-terminating contracts.  Legal things we figured.  Six years is about the point where most people who are on a tenure track get tenure or not.  That’s the typical “probationary” period.  So we figured that they picked four because it was not six.  Six would make the Visiting Lecturer position resemble a tenure track position, and that might be misinterpreted by, say, a Court of Law as implying the possibility to permanent employment.  So four was the rule not six, and this became known among Lecturers as four years and out.

Many of my colleagues from middle class backgrounds really didn’t understand this self-terminating contract in an elemental way.  They thought it was unjust.  I didn’t think it was just or unjust.  Just the way it was.  The boss is the boss and you are not.  It’s simple really.