A Day in the Life

It's possible that my day-in-the-life adjunct's novel is partly the inspiration for Lee Kottner's newish project of encouraging part-time faculty to post their daily lives as blogs.

So far, for contributions, Migrant Intellectual is back after months of archive hibernation, and Brianne Bolin posted a touching one about adjuncting while raising a special-needs child. Both Baum and Bolin focus in part on how the contingent life adversely impacts physical and mental health, and it should be noted you could be  part-time and overworking anywhere, not only in academia, to experience these negative impacts.

On a related note, Isaac Sweeney, the publisher of my commencement-angst e-story (it's 35 pages) has his new nonfiction out on his transition from adjunct to full-time community-college faculty. It's called Same Track, Different Track, and here's the mostly memoir's first sentence quoted from the Amazon Book Description:

"I was never supposed to be where I am today. In academia, the route to the tenure track has on it a terminal degree, publications in peer-reviewed journals, and other what-everybody-else-has-done things.”

Bottomline? There's something odd about the America we share in where one adjunct without a terminal degree gets a community-college TT while others with similar qualifications scramble for cash and courses as they cannot even get an annual guarantee of work. Alas, as with houses and cars, our American lives are largely negotiated and navigated on an individual basis; that's what I know to be true.

The whole situation is also a reminder that I have to be grateful for all I have in this world, and highly aware of possible dishonesty if I'm going to claim it's been "earned."