thank you, teacher

I wanted to share this excerpt from Migrant Intellectual with all of my teaching friends:

First, thank you.
Thank you for your work.
Thank you for staying in the game.
You are so important; your work is so important; your voice is so important.
You are a blessing to your students, to your friends and family, to yourself.
In the language of my mentor Avital Ronell, you are a dear one, my friend.

In these words, Dr. Baum is comforting an adjunct who reports from the teaching front on her own anxieties and second-hand clothing. It reminds me of how my father wandered back into the world of higher education in the mid-90s, having not taught a college class since the early 1970s but in need of an income years after losing what he had in the white collar world of computers and technology.

Anyway, in Florida, he was scheduled to teach calculus at a community college, and with some passion he planned his lessons and gave it go. But he walked in on the first day, saw twice as many students as he was told he'd be instructing, felt he was lied to, and resigned on the spot. His pay would have been $1,400 for one class over 15 weeks, and although he needed work, he wasn't willing to work for that sum. He is just one of many folks I know who couldn't or wouldn't teach for such paltry wages, or was apprehensive to terrified about teaching at all.

So, teachers, when you get there, enjoy your break. You deserve it.

As they say, you're making a difference.

Back to my father, a beautiful moment for me this fall was when I discovered a note in my facebook "other messages" that was from one of his math students from 1973 or so. The gentleman, just finishing up an engineering career, from another country and living in a state far from Philadelphia, wrote to ask if I was Joe Kudera's son, and then told me my father taught him in a math class at Temple University (yes, adjunct work), and that my father would see him in University City and offer to give him a lift to Temple's North Philly campus. It was good to hear that my father extending himself to this young man 40 years ago was a memory the older version cherished enough to seek out news of his driver-teacher.

This also reminded me of all the positive things you hear about adjuncts, all the different ways they are extending themselves to help within their communities, and it also reminded me of the positive side of my father. I'm sure this kind of memory is bouncing around my brain because I recently finished Townie, Andre Dubus III's look at his own present-absent, giving-taking, learning-teaching father.

Last night, when I should have been grading still, I was also editing a short piece, another excerpt from The Book of Jay, about my father's poverty of the late 1970s, between tech gigs, when he successfully negotiated with the Christmas tree guy and wound up with all he could afford, the top two feet of a tree, a serviceable amount for any giving season. Maybe I can finish this grading and get rough draft of that excerpt online before the end of Channukah.

Best wishes, Dr. Baum, as you navigate the waters of the adjunct life and beyond.

another home for the homeless adjunct

Debra Leigh Scott's "How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps" was picked up and retitled at alternet.org. So Debra is fighting her way through the capitalist thicket of her "edupreneurship," and it appears as if she is making progress. My understanding is that she very much needs to get a profitable movie deal, big league book contract, or some other such financial reward from all of her hard work "saving" other people's faculty or students, and I'm sure millions of people she is fighting for could use some extra bucks, health coverage, and more. It would be a wonderful thing if all of her work ultimately does help level the economic playing field for students and teachers at American universities, but it's all important to recognize, and help publicize, that there are some programs in place to help both of these groups.

I guess it takes a lot longer to read a novel on the subject, and that could be one reason Fight for Your Long Day only has so many readers. But overall, in these times of social media and short-attention spans, folks seem to love a good opinionated essay on a topic, and then their free-and-easy chance to opine anonymously in the comments section, much more than any reading that might be harder work at times and offer its share of moral ambiguity and doubt about all kinds of agendas.

Moderate or nuanced positions are merely for suckers and cowards; defined outrage is in. Yeah, it's election season, so let's let it all hang out and "F" those who oppose us every chance we get. If you don't believe me, just ask everyone from Bill O'Reilly to Rachel Maddow to Rush Limbaugh to Michael Moore. Novels with nuances and ambiguity and perhaps even a strange, half-hidden nonpartisan streak despite a healthy dollop of the left in its focus on the leftover do not go over as well in these polarized times.

On the other hand, it could just be that folks haven't heard of the book. In Philadelphia on Tuesday evening, at a poetry reading, two different folks, one a poet and the event organizer, the other an English adjunct at Drexel, didn't recognize the title when my poet-accomplice was kind enough to bring it up in introducing me to these guys. I've noticed according to amazon's author central, my teaching region has sold many more copies than have moved in Philadelphia despite the book being in a window at the Faber in 30th Street Station as well as in the Sunday section of the Philly Inquirer's business news.

So, as they say, it is what it is.

In sales we talk about how out of ten people, the one person who dislikes you or your product will tell ten people whereas the folks who like you or it will tell one person. Over two years of marketing a novel, I've come to learn that at least in the case of this book, if the person does like the book, the one person they are most likely to tell is the author.

But, aside from another spate of insomnia, I've been in good spirits recently and have experienced life's "blessings and light" in other ways. Some of the examples of the bitter, aging, drunken writers, among the amazingly successful ones, are rather disturbing, and we can all do our best to try to remain outside of that category of writer whether we're famous, infamous, unknown, or entirely forgotten.

I'm working full-time, everyone in my family seems to have health benefits that work (knock on plastic keyboard), I do have readers, and some of these readers seem to hold my only published novel in high regard. What more, not only do I have occasional time to read (Foucault's lectures of all things!) and write fiction, but I also have the opportunity to communicate with motivated college students and live vicariously through all the various lives and diverse majors that a general-education curriculum brings together in one room.

Although it can be alternately, or even all at once, fascinating, stressful, unbelievable, and terrifying that some of my best students here are seeing the world in terms exactly antithetical to Debra Leigh Scott and everyone else fighting for some greater good or social justice, I learn a lot more from being in a room with my current students than I would if I were back in Philly, teaching in another version of America, one I have more experience with.

Okay. Better try the bed again.

debra leigh scott

Debra Leigh Scott's "insightful article" on "How The American University was Killed in Five Easy Steps" flew around the web and was just recently picked up by Forbes Magazine.