Life after grad school also had its share of impermanence as I continued at the urban community college and had a brief stint teaching English at the FIDM. I then tried jumping ship by getting a more “regular” job at one hot mess of a labor union’s headquarters. That lasted for six months, followed by six months of unemployment. Then, during that time, I courted English department chairs and a director of a foreign language school, and I found myself on the freeway flier circuit in the fall of ’07. After a year and a half, I didn’t return to any classes with one district, continued to work for another until I got laid off.

After having been through the constant semester by semester patterns of working, with new students and new curricula every time, you’d think that I’d be used to impermanence. Even with the jobs that didn’t work out, you’d think I’d be equipped for it. With jobs of a temporary nature, such as the language school, it’s not every day that I get that “Mrs Peel, you’re needed” type of phone call. Even with being back at the urban college and working another education-related gig, things aren’t so permanent. After the end of the semester, I always have to figure out my employment situation for summer and beyond.

Despite my Asian roots (OK, only half my roots), I’ve longed for an American life and enjoying what it had to offer. When I was a young Army brat, we moved around quite a bit and we even got to live in Okinawa for a few years. I haven’t been back since. My mother is disappointed with me that I never took the opportunity to teach in Japan when I was younger and she still pushes me to do so. Perhaps it’s not too late. The American life I hoped for was a pipe-dream that sustained me through a McJob, college, and grad school, and even my pursuit of making a living after graduate school. Perhaps getting the MLIS is an extension of that, but I also want to gain skills where I can do something other than teaching. I could take that abroad with me, and every day, Japan or China doesn’t seem like a bad idea.

Whether one works as a contingent member of the workforce, as a freelancer, or both, no job situation is ever fully in place. One may have those long-term relationships with employers and/or clients, but they can be easily terminated by either party. Constantly having to find work and sources of income is a reality that something that most people don’t really have to face until times like now, when companies look out for their bottom line and trim jobs. This is definitely an upsetting lesson in impermanence as those who may have worked at their jobs for many years may come head on with financial difficulties and even have to deal with fundamental changes to their identities.

While there is a cliché in our culture that we are not our work, it’s not true. Many people do draw a sense of who they are from their jobs or professions. Seeking to define oneself professionally is a driving force in seeking and preparing for a career. These people would not be in their lines of work if it didn’t interest them and the pride they take in their jobs helps show their identification with them. With career change comes a shift in identity. People shift careers in good times, but that is often the result of much thought and soul-searching. In times like this “recession,” many people who lose their jobs are no longer who they thought they were. Being unemployed is depressing, even with the benefits, because it can deal a serious blow to one’s self-worth. Being defined as unemployed can feel worse than death. Even if one comes out of joblessness or even manages to escape it, the jobs may not be in line with what they prepared for or are interested in. For some people, the work they procure may be “beneath them.” For example, in Tokyo Sonata, a laid-off Japanese executive first pretends to go to work and then hides his job from his family when he finally gets one. He has gone from managing an office and not really knowing what he does to cleaning floors and toilets at a shopping mall. It is certainly not an easy period of adjustment.

Even then, joblessness and bad jobs do not last forever. Like the desirable careers, these two things are subject to change. It can spell doom for some, as losing one’s unemployment benefits or having them changed, or losing the awful gig that served as a lifeboat in the current economic storm. Or, these things don’t last because whoever needed them was able to move onto something else. Given that, I greatly hope the impermanence of this crisis will be a good thing.

A year ago, I read about Cloutier in Robert Frank’s Richistan and forgot about it. Much of the people profiled in that book were new money, especially those that became rich in the late Clinton or Bush years. Apparently, the guilded age Frank mentions is no longer a reality, but Cloutier is still in business because he has a “strong sales organization.” Of course, his customer base, ailing small businesses, is even more desperate than ever and should keep sales going for some time.

According to him, businesses should not blame the recession, saying it “has been an excuse for poor performance.” Businesses need “strong sales organization,” which he’ll happily teach for a fee and the privilege of getting his hands dirty on the job. They, in return, make it possible for him and his wife to attend charity balls and gain social status.

Getting back to why I find this man fascinating is that the interview and his business are about a teaching style. The tough talk and the hard truths, as glib as they can be, center around teachable moments. To teach something, one has to be as direct and succeint like Cloutier. Ramsay has taken this approach with some pop psychology mumbo jumbo and has ruined his clients though airing their dirty laundry on TV. I looked through American Management Service’s list of clients served, and everything listed by industry, not companies. On one hand, Cloutier’s clients are protected by confidentiality, but on the other hand, there isn’t concrete evidence to go on with AMS’s success stories. But money is to be made on some kind of education, especially if the client needs it to survive these uncertain times.

Some of my first posts for ShindoTV were about the burn from the stove. Having gotten out of the MFA program and finding myself in adjunct hell (which I strangely bought into some bait & switch scheme in my thesis year), I regretted ever enrolling. I issued a warning and then proceeded to write about my experiences, especially some dramatic ones. For the grand price of admission, a $50K student loan, I found that I gained plenty of experiences compared to my sheltered life of my undergrad years, but very little to show for it. I made friends, met nefarious professors, and even had some god-awful jobs with the clientele to go with them. I could have gotten two of the three without going to school. Actually, no. I definitely could have made friends anywhere, but some of those crappy jobs involved students.

If you asked me ten years ago what I wanted to do with my English major, I would have told you writing. Given that being a writer can be a gigantic crap shoot, aspiring writers in college hedge their dream by choosing some career that will provide them with an income that will suck up their days while they do their writing at night, play weekend warrior with the craft, or both. All I wanted to do was get out of the grocery store job that helped finance my college education. Early in the program, I found myself playing assistant editor in a university press magazine ran by a self-serving professor. Somehow, my experience never transferred to the non-academic sector. Teaching, however, was the ultimate hedge.

When I studied in undergraduate creative writing workshops, I thought it would be great to teach aspiring writers. I would be a nurturing professor, not those evil teachers who crush and destroy those kids whose only dream is to be the next Bukowski or whoever else young writers are fond of reading these days. When I finally got my chance as a TA with an intro creative writing class, I found that I had a class that was too big, strange demands put on me to teach both fiction and poetry, and some unruly students, especially a bitch named Mindy Shatner. Unfortunately, those negatives have overshadowed the positives for me in the course, such as that with some students, I really did succeed in my objectives.

Given that first experience, I’m surprised I came back for more. I did a TA’ship for an Intro to Lit course and got in trouble for grade inflation for the sections I taught. The professor was not pleased with me and even sent me an e-mail with “this is the university, not summer camp.” Really? Yes, the university was solidly accredited, but as far as it being a bastion of higher learning… Don’t make me laugh.

I even did an internship program for those who want to teach community college. It was a program coordinated with all the districts in the county and I took it up for resume fodder. I worked for free one semester and got a paying class the next. For someone who was finishing up grad school, I was making more money than I did with my crappy university gigs. The reality was one class really didn’t pay much, though I’d get a better sense of this after graduating and then trying to cobble together an income.

The one thing I dislike about the adjunct lifestyle is that I didn’t go to grad school to try to hustle up a living with multiple jobs. This was the type of thing people do when their jobs are completely inadequate to live on. This is the treadmill the working poor find themselves on. Education, it seems, provides no exemption to this demographic. At times I bitch too much about it. I want to jump off this boat.

I’ve tried a couple of times to leave adjunct teaching. Once, I got a job in some non-profit’s mailroom, which was short lived. When that job fell through, I sent many resumes, which seemed to go to the digital bin. Occasionally, I had an interview, but no offer. Even though I didn’t wholeheartedly want to return to it, my teaching experience was more of a sure sell as I courted various colleges’ department chairs. I’ve recently accepted a night course for purely mercenary reasons – I need the money.

Looking back, I could have learned about writing on my own without college or the MFA. There are enough books on the craft of creative writing and even some silly motivational ones to keep an aspiring writer going. Finding other people who were interested in writing has never been that difficult, so it’s possible to create a community without expensive programs. As for a literary education, I don’t doubt I could have gained more from reading without a professor telling me what to think and what to write in a bluebook.

I wish I could say I’m taking a positive turn from this chapter in my life, that I am bravely going into my post-academic life. I wish I could follow that glib advice “If you don’t like your job, leave.” Yeah, easier said than done, especially when jobs are really hard to come by. If I had a time machine, perhaps I would retcon my life. Somehow, I have a feeling I’d still burn my hand on the stove.

I’ve been guilty of speaking off the cuff a lot to classrooms over the past few years. Obviously, preparation is the solution, but it was a matter of time, or that I was too busy, etc. It’s easy to do when there are several classes. However, lack of preparation makes for a trainwreck. And bad communication.

Last week, I made a script for my second day of class for the summer. I made notes on the reading assignment, wrote down what the students essentially needed to know about the text, and even threw in my talking points. Even if it took several hours of my time to prepare, I had a much smoother class session. It was much better than if I took it for granted that I read the story a few times and tried to get class participation out of them. Even if last week’s lesson wasn’t perfect, I was communicating and the students were. Also, I didn’t feel as drained as I would on unprepared classroom sessions.

I wish I could just talk without the pre-written stuff. I envy the people who can really hold their own without the notes and who don’t have to mentally write their sentences. Then again, I can spell and I know my punctuation. I can apply this type of approach of writing before I speak to other things, especially if I am speaking before any kind of audience. For video or podcast, I can write. All I need to do if fine tune it so it doesn’t take so much time to do. For notes I make now, I can always re-use and revise, but creating new stuff is where the challenge is.

I have made some meaningful connections with faculty and students at the institutions where I have taught. However, I have been in some less-than-ideal situations and dealt with some “scary monsters.” Also, regardless of the class load, it feels like I kill myself with work. I am all for hard work. I’m just not for overwork. Working day and night on things really isn’t that efficient, but it is reality for many “freeway flyers.” I’ve had quite a few semesters where I’ve driven to several campuses, had lots of papers to read, and not much downtime between it all. I have become so sick of “killing myself” for little pay.

How the hell did I get myself in this situation? I only have myself to blame as I willingly took on low-paying jobs in graduate school, seeing them as stepping stones. I essentially worked as an editorial assistant for Professor K’s deviant lit journal for $200 a month. Even though it stressed me out a great deal, tutoring for the Rhetoric department added a few hundred dollars to my income. I also worked for an independent bookstore one day a week, which I really enjoyed. Then there was the TA’ships, which paid $345 a month each. One semester I taught creative writing to lower division students, and $345 a month covered keeping track of 30 students, prepping, grading work, dealing with stage fright, and putting up with abuse from Mindy Shatner and some others. A semester later, $345 a month covered two breakout sections of a large lecture course taught by a tenured professor (so I was responsible for 60 of her students), reading & reviewing works on her syllabus even if I’ve read them before, giving quizzes (thank God for Scantron), and then whizzing through the half-baked student essays written for the midterm and final. Given that I got used to having low pay, teaching a community college English class (which grossed at $700-$800 a month) seemed like a great job to have during my thesis semester.

I must add that before graduate school, I worked for a grocery store for over a decade and I hated it. The income was more stable, I no doubt made more money per month than on any of my piddly academic gigs, and I had great benefits. Somehow, those things weren’t enough to to keep me doing one grocery job or another, so I walked away and never looked back.

Some people have been able to feign excitement at sales or some pointless functionary job in a corporation, but I’ve never been able to do that. What kid grows up thinking, ‘Yes, I want to be mindless pencil pusher who has all the time in world to look at I Can Has Cheezburger?’ I wanted to be an actor, a violinist, a dancer, a painter, etc. I never became any of those things. However, I found writing to be a worthwhile pursuit and got into an MFA program. The employment prospects were never abundant, but risk and pursuing passion were much sexier than getting stuck behind some desk in a pseudo-office, AKA cubicle. Perhaps I should have taken a cubicle and stuck with it. I would have hated it much more than I ever hated the grocery store, but I’d have resources to abuse such as a computer, broadband networks, printers, and copiers. Then I could raid the supply lockers for things such as Post-It’s and glue sticks. But, I know the perks don’t always outweigh the hell of such environments.

On some perverse level, I wanted something to show for my education, even if the pay was the proverbial peanuts. Also, there was a recent time in my life where pursuing teaching gigs was more of a sure bet than non-teaching ones. I took jobs where I could get them. Even with a worsening economy, I don’t want to be resigned to that. For my own personal economy, it’s not sustainable as paying some bills and keeping up with some expenses have been difficult over the past few months. A bail-out would be nice.

That I’ve taken a few small steps to get out of this, such as getting in to an MLIS program, has given me some hope. Patience, hard work, and sacrifice are in order. So, my experience with academic poverty may serve me well in the next couple of years. Here’s to longterm goals and the “light at the end of the tunnel.”

Going back to school to earn another degree is crazy enough. On top of that, I still have to work. I have to fund my MLIS program and still have to pay for the other things life requires. I also don’t want anymore student loans. Juggling classes and a job (make that plural) can be chaotic. I remember that from working on my BA and I took public transportation to get everywhere. I now have a car and much of my coursework will be online, but I still have the classes and any other jobs to balance. Getting some library experience will certainly add to the chaos in my life less than a year from now.

I quickly developed a system that’s still in progress. I’ve organized my assignments and made sure to return them no more than two class meetings. I have a system for my grades. The rubrics for writing assignments make them easier to grade, and immediately recording the scores in Excel saves time. I’ve kept grades in my head in the past, which is a very dangerous thing to do. There is no solid evidence for why students get their grades, even if I knew why and could explain it. Grade sheets, if demanded by the school, then become works of fiction (despite whatever knowledge is applied). In recording grades in a timely manner, I create an honest record where I have solid evidence for why the students did great or did poorly. While no less busier, sanity is something I’ve gained. Also, being prompt makes things much easier.

Grade inflation is something I can avoid in working more systematically. When I was near finishing my MFA, I got in trouble with a professor over grades that were too good for my break-out sections. I as the the student wanted to help them out, give them a break. However, I might have just helped them move on with the bad habits they acquired in that literature class. They then are not equipped for the next class and they will fail. What I do in a non-classroom setting with an employee, whether it’s training them or giving them an idea about their job performance, may not help if I communicate with them unrealistically. For example, if I lead someone to think they’re doing great when they’re not, they’ll just continue on with their bad working habits until it becomes necessary to fire them.

Interacting with students teaches me to deal with various kinds of people. Most people, given a fair amount of respect and commitment, will behave reasonably. However, there are those who will push and see what they can get away with. In some classes, there are only a few people like that. Here, it’s easy to handle them and the group dynamic makes a wonderful back-up. However, when there’s an entire group of them, like the “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps),” then gaining control is difficult. Also, if authority isn’t established in the beginning, then having anyone work within expectations becomes a nightmare. I don’t want any more “Scary Monsters” in any situation. If I’m too nice, people can take advantage of that, and if I’m too adversarial, then I alienate them. Students teach me that I must be fair, but firm with people.

I feel silly admitting this, but communication is something I’ve been learning in the classroom. Outlining expectations and continuing to make them clear is one thing. Giving them what they need to know in order to carry out their task is key. I can’t be like Miranda Priestly and say, “Bore someone else with your questions.” Also, I’ve been learning to let people know where they stand and how they could improve. That way, I catch their bad habits and failures early and I can hopefully set up win-win situations without resorting to inflating grades, performance evaluations, etc.

Needless to say, I haven’t turned into a teaching saint, become professor of the year, or achieved perfection. Perhaps in the last semester I ever teach college-level English, I’ll have mastered these lessons. In the meantime, I am cultivating the skills that will help me later on in life.

Just thinking about that awful class in writing “Rubric’s Cube” brought back a lot of memories. I had a really cute and clever title and a great example of a horrendous experience that taught me to be better organized and put some time into my classes. With the adjunct lifestyle, this can be quite a challenge, but the customers, I mean students, can be merciless. They may not know if a professor is an adjunct or full-time. Even if they do, they may not care. I never did, but I treated my teachers with respect when I was in college. Now that I’m on the other side, I must keep in mind that not all students are like me.

The nightmare class I had several semesters ago was one of those linked classes, which means another professor shares the same group of students with me. I previously said the course was a freshman composition class, which it essentially is, but it really is the remedial¹ course if the student doesn’t place into transfer-level composition. They needed help with college writing skills (where I come in) and reading for college. Ideally, the linked courses should be a great tool for student success, but teaching in a linked turned out to be a nightmare for me.

The comparisons between the other professor and me were inevitable. She was a full-time teacher who had the curriculum for the reading course for quite some time and she always gave them “packets” so that they could understand the books they had to read. In comparison, I was much less put together and they saw it. Even if I had a valid approach to something, they challenged it. One time, I told one of my students not to be so cynical, and he asked me what that word meant. I told him to look it up and his response was that the other professor always used the word in a sentence (which I took to mean that she taught them the meaning of some words through context). My cynical assessment is that they were too lazy to even use a dictionary.

From one student, whom I’ll call Dillan², I got a dose of adolescent contempt, where she has made up her mind that I was an idiot and she treated me as such. There was one essay she never turned in and when I asked her about it, she said she didn’t even bother doing it because she didn’t understand the prompt and I didn’t explain it well. She was the type of person who’d rather take an F than try to communicate with a teacher she didn’t like. She didn’t see any point in it and it was my fault.

There was another time where I told the class to read a chapter from Punching In, and Dillan yelled at me because she thought I told them to buy a new book and read it for homework. Afterwards, when it was clear to her that the book was in the syllabus, she was still unrepentant about her outburst. Later, when I tried to take Dillan aside (right at the start of class) to talk about the issue, she refused, feeling that the discussion should occur in front of the class. She said that she couldn’t talk without the class. Of course, this meant that she had an audience, which became much clearer when she relented in speaking with me outside of the class (with a witness present). She said the entire class felt similarly to her (dissatisfaction), so there was no point in keeping such a discussion private. She then upbraided me for not finding her twenty minutes before class and talking to her about the issue then, when she was hanging out nearby the classroom. Somehow, my idiocy included not knowing what she was up to at any given moment.

That class was like a boat I didn’t feel safe traversing the ocean in. If the situation with Dillan was one hole that was uneasily patched up, then there were a few other leaks that threatened to sink me. One young woman angrily confronted me about a paper of hers I couldn’t find. Somehow, I don’t think a benefit of a doubt grade would have satisfied her. Then, someone told me to watch my back as Fiora, who often left class early to pick up her mother from work, was stirring the class against me. Later, some students told the dean that there was a final exam I didn’t show up for. I didn’t set the date up, so I’ve always suspected it was a group effort. Another student revealed at the end of the semester that some tried to get her involved in their discussion on how to get me fired, but she would have no part of it. According to her, they even thought about ways to make me look bad in front of the dean when she visited my class for an evaluation. While they may have not succeed in making me leave the class, they definitely made me not want to return for any more. I had barely made it to shore in a boat with a hull in very bad shape.

I remember a case from last year where a lecturer at Dartmouth tried to sue her students for being causing her emotional distress. The way she has been portrayed in several blogs and periodicals make her seem unhinged. That she e-mailed her students threatening a lawsuit didn’t help matters much. Whatever the cause of her dispute with her students, she definitely felt she was in a hostile work environment. Typically, bosses or coworkers are the perpetrators of the hostility, but the source can also be the customer or client.

It’s hard to satisfy a customer once they’ve decided they’re not pleased with you. Whether I was wrong or not in the situation didn’t matter. No matter how much I tried to teach better or improve with them, it was not enough. I never went back to that college after my semester with the monster class was over. It wasn’t a shop I felt comfortable working in.

1. Remedial is an older term, now politically incorrect, for developmental classes. Essentially catch-up courses.
2. Creative misspelling for a name. Who knows what goes on in these mothers’ minds when they do this.

I haven’t blogged, Twittered, or even Facebooked much lately. I got caught up in the Rubric‘s Cube.

In getting back into teaching this semester, I found that I needed to have a system or else I’d quickly sink. Students may not mind a teacher without structure in the beginning, but that soon gets old. If they become restless, students will eat the scattered professor alive.

There was one semester last year where I barely escaped from a class with my life. I taught one freshman composition class that proved to be a nightmare. While it didn’t help that I cancelled some classes due to dealing with the accident and an illness, I was simply disorganized. My bookbags were chaotic with essays from various classes that mingled together with all the memos and junk mail from my faculty mailboxes. I was drowning in papers from that class and the others I taught at several other community colleges. Papers would be returned several weeks later, and I even lost some. And then I found myself trying to keep down a student mutiny. One student went off in front of me with the class as her audience. Even though I moved the discussion away from class, she was right – there were others who weren’t happy. Another student attempted to fuck me up with a question he knew I wasn’t comfortable answering when the dean visited my class for an evaluation. Worst of all, I learned from a young woman in my class that some people conspired to get me fired and tried to get her involved. To her credit, she didn’t want any part of it.

That semester was the worst one since I taught a creative writing class for the first time in grad school. With the TA’ship, I didn’t know what I was doing and Mindy Shatner was just some poor soul who didn’t know better when constantly disrupted my courses. No, she did know better and that makes her an asshole. But this post isn’t about her. I knew more of what I was doing in that freshman composition class. I just didn’t have a good system of running the class.  Even after taking responsibility for that awful semester, I still see those student mutineers as monsters. Dealing with the nightmare students is one of the reasons why I’ve recently taken steps for a career change.

In the meantime, I am still in the classroom and I don’t want to recreate that semester. I’ve created rubrics for evaluating their writing, which makes it easier for me. It’s not a perfect system, but I give myself several questions to answer about their work and a scoring scale, and that makes grading much easier, even if it takes a few more minutes. I’ve worked on getting assignments back to my students in a short amount of time. I also started keeping more detailed records about grades, especially on Excel spreadsheets. I recently used that data to show my current students where they stand.

I may not want to be a professor for the rest of my life, but I’ll certainly work on being a better one in the meantime. If I can do this, than I can do anything.

I also need to thank the tree spirits this week as I used up two reams of paper to give my students various hand-outs (all with the hopes that they’d earn good grades, of course).

Last week, I got started on a new career path. I just got accepted into the Master of Library and Information Science program at San Jose State University. I have contemplated applying ever since I was working after graduation from grad school, mainly because adjunct teaching is so unstable. Also, I like libraries a lot. I always have. I finally took action back in November and applied.

Part of why it took me a few years to get to this decision was inaction. I would think about doing something, yet I didn’t follow through. Also, I had spent many years in school between my BA and my MFA. Some people I knew saw me as a “professional student” or “college student for life,” and I’ve never liked those labels, even if it took me forever to earn my degrees. Even though I wished I did this sooner, I’ve had a few years where I had some time to let go of my identity as a student.

I have had an uneasy relationship with teaching over the past few years. There are some things I like about it, such as seeing students have that “aha!” moment when they’re learning to write. On the flipside, I’m a highly introverted person and it does take a lot out of me explain things to groups of people day after day. Plus, the adjunct lifestyle’s a tough one (the pay and the driving around to cover a small state) and I’m absolutely certain that I don’t want to become a full-time professor.

I’m not ready to jump the teaching ship yet (unconventional work schedule is a plus), but I definitely need some work experience in my new field. I’m going to meet with the volunteer coordinator of my local branch of the city library to see about doing some volunteer work. Plus, I’ll keep my eyes open for library jobs. I certainly feel that my experience with students isn’t negated, as I may draw upon it for later. Plus, I might wind up teaching college students about libraries later on. I can never say never on that.