Adjunct Hell

Years ago during my writing career I dipped in and out of teaching like a drunk going back to the same run down bar. I was the aspiring writer coming into the purview of the full time professors. I usually got the crappy classes nobody wanted at eight AM and it was usually first year comp. I taught at a very prestigious expensive private school. Two of them in fact. When they had faculty meetings the room was full of adjuncts. In the middle sat the anointed full time professors, all five of them. The other twenty five teachers were adjuncts. This was at a school that charged 40K a year in tuition.

So I learned quickly there were two worlds. The hotdog money world of the adjuncts (2500-3500) a class and the tenured full time 70k+ world of the professors who generally didn't speak to the adjuncts. My brother is a full fledged professor and he told me many times that the adjuncts came and went so why get to know them. So you show up at a class with no fanfare at all. You were hired months before and then you never saw anyone again. You teach your guts out for a class or two and then you get in your car and drive home. That's it.

No collegian conversations. No going out with your colleagues over lunch. No dinners with the University President. You are on the outside, you are the lone ranger, the interloper, in fact you don't exist. The students call you professor  but they do not know the dirty secret .You are not really employed, you are a contract player who will probably not return.Hey what are you teaching next semester?  You demure. You don't know. If enrollment is down you wont be teaching anything. And then you just disappear. That's what happened with me. You just don't get another class.

So you get the word that your class was taken by a full time professor. You try and get another class but suddenly it is like you never taught at all. You are unemployed. So you do what any self respecting writer would do...you sit down and write a book. And never look back.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

The Learning Laboratory

The pencils are on the desk. The math books open to basic equations. Some of the pencils are in the pages. A few are on the floor. The SMART board is on and humming. But the kids and the teacher are gone. I have arrived early for a speech to find everyone at lunch and I am afforded an unfettered look at the modern learning laboratory of the third grade. The headings South East West North are on the walls. Writing rules float in space and are taped on the walls.  Prepositions. Nouns. Verbs. Subject. Action.

There is a water bottle on the floor. A pencil. Some paper. An eraser. The children were taken out quickly you can see that. There are rules on the wall for spelling. Rules for thinking. Acting. Rules for life. There is the clock. There are the books and the large rocking chair for reading. And in here you can see how hard the kids and the teachers work. You can see all that knowledge flying around the room. And it is serious business. Because they are looking for food. And the room is jammed with the food of knowledge.

And you can just see those teachers in their work. You can see the open laptop under the American flag and the proverbial apple on the desk. So much important work goes on in here it makes you feel guilty. Yes the worlds work must be done but this shaping of young minds does seem pre-imminent. And you hope the teachers stay to their task. Because in this laboratory in the middle of the day in the middle of nowhere are people who are doing the heavy lifting for all  of us.

Could it be any more important?

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

The Writer and Teaching

Writers have always taken shelter in teaching. The Universities are brimming with writers. That's because it is friendly territory. You can actually talk about what you do without someone giving you that cross eyed look that always follows with...so what is your day job? And this is because writers are suspect. You are doing something that keeps you at home and a lot of times you don't even get out of your robe. So teaching is a respectable alternative.

I have been speaking in a lot of schools lately and you can not help thinking...what if. What if I had become a teacher. Would I still write? Probably not. The rub is this. Once that weekly paycheck comes then all that motivation goes out the window. And time becomes a scarce commodity. Lets face it after reading student fiction and grading it and commenting on it  then by the time you start on your own work you are already played out.

Still the security and the camaraderie and the higher calling of helping others is alluring. Writers twist in the wind and a lot of times they just blow away. There are no support groups or rules of the road. It is pretty much every man for himself. So who can blame someone for swinging in with the pack and taking a pension and a paycheck.

But then...you really do have to follow your destiny. Besides, who would give the author talks if everyone became a teacher?

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Can Writing Be Taught?

Something to wrestle with. The problem is teaching has nothing to do with writing. We were all taught to diagram sentences with grammar spelling and punctuation. This can be taught. We can be assigned papers. We can complete the papers but this is not teaching writing. John Gardner in the Art of Fiction basically says that you have to have the talent in the first place. That if this talent is not there then no amount of teaching will do  it.

I am teaching an advanced fiction class at a private college and it is a question that pops up. Can writing be taught? Even craft is a hard one to teach to someone because it is the experimentation of rewriting that is craft. Basically writers have to be wired up. Their brains have to figure out why one word works when another one does not.

And of course we are talking connotation and denotation. What does a word really do. And this is something instinctual that no amount of courses can give you. I would even argue writing courses hurt writers because they codify what should never have been codified in the beginning. Still one has to try and convey what one has learned.

And so maybe it is like the old nudge the horse to water scenario.
But the thirst must be there.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher..What if a dream was all you had

Waiting For Superman

Go see this movie. Go see it for your children, go see it for your school, go see  it for your country. Because if we believe American is in decline then we should at least know why the last great chapter of this country is closing down on us in the beginning of the twenty first century. You cannot escape that feeling anymore. And you wonder where it all began. Why do our towns look like burned out rust belt towns with no commerce except for some river boat pulled in for a last gasp of economic resuscitation? Why is our culture bankrupt and vapid?Why are we trailing the world now ? It had to start with our kids.

This documentary should not be political. Waiting for Superman should not make teachers coil up and dig in and say no way. The union should not say this is the Antichrist of all film making because it suggests that tenure is not a good thing for our children and that charter schools are not anomalies. Wisconsin is unfortunate because it casts a political light on the question of what is wrong with our schools? Why will we have only 53 million skilled workers for 130 million high tech jobs in 2020? Why do our tech companies go halfway around the world right now to find the engineers they need. Why are we almost last in math and science in the Industrialized nations?

Our schools are in decline because they are incapable of change. As a parent I get this. I have seen this. I have seen good and bad teachers, but the thought they are on equal footing is unacceptable. It is not a matter of economics anymore. It would be nice if we could assume this only exists in parts of the country, but our entire country did not test up to the proficiency standards in math and science for eight graders. Now why is that? Could it be, as the film so eloquently points out, it has become all about the adults and not the kids.

The film ends with a challenge. Do something. Do something to make our schools better. I hope I can do more, but the best I can do right now is to tell you to watch this movie and pass it on. Maybe then we can figure out what to do next.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in April

The Downloadable Classroom

If you have kids in school now then you are in the down loadable classroom. Now we are all teachers. If little Johnny or Suzy has a problem the teacher simply downloads it to the parent. The download comes in the form of emails, websites, twitters, webinars. You name it, teachers discovered the cyber world has a built in time saver--you download all your problems to the parents and you have done your job. Also, you can vent in a lovely one way vehicle called the email bomb and dress down little Suzie or Johnny's deficiencies and again the problem has been taken off the teachers desk.

Used to be a teacher had to teach. If a student really didn't get it then they had to get in there and teach...you know, convey a concept to the student who is having a hard time grasping the concept. Now. They simply let the parent know the student is having problems and would they please work with Suzy or Johnny on their science, math, social studies, reading, geography, and by the way little Suzy and Johnny talked in class, forgot their pencil, forgot to put the lock on their locker, took too long going to the bathroom, chewed gum, texted on their phone, burped, looked out the window, yawned, looked bored, laughed, scribbled on their desk and would you the parent please take care of that also?

Ok. I get it. Maybe everyone doesn't get these emails. But education has become a web based commodity and the teachers are gatekeepers. If there was not an internet then homework could not be near as elaborate and certainly any kind of disciplinary problems would be taken care of in the classroom. What the open laptop does for teachers is it allows them to vent at that moment when a kid makes them mad. They vent directly to the parent. What a luxury. How would you like to vent every time your boss made you mad or you had a problem at work. But the teachers have found a perfect get it off my desk device. Clearly the problem student is now at the mercy of Blackboard.com.

But if you are pulled into the classroom for a conference then you will be introduced to another little time saver for the teacher--the TEAM. No longer will you face off with your kids teacher--you will face off with seven teachers who back each other up. Again, think about work. You have a grievance against your boss. You meet him with seven people who back you up. I don't think so. In the TEAM world it is your word against the seven teachers. Watch out for anyone who speaks of the THE TEAM. There is no responsibility in that kind of plurality. No one is at fault except for little Suzy or Johnny and by proxy you the parent. Like the faceless void of the Internet--there is no responsibility for teaching your child.

So the only thing I can think of is to block the emails. Maybe then a teacher might pick up the phone or actually solve the problem in class. Or they might....um, five letter word, starts with a t and ends with an h....ah, I know, teach!

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/