The Art of Not Knowing

Every time I teach my online fiction writing course, several students introduce themselves by saying, in one form or another, that by the end of the class they hope to find out whether they have talent.

I, too, would like to know whether I have talent. Every time I sit down to write, I have the urge to gaze at at my own work like Narcissus gawking at his own image in a pool, and I wonder whether what I create is beautiful, horrifically bad, or simply in need of substantial revision. I am not alone. For instance, Lynda Barry, in her autobiographical comic, “Two Questions,” recounts how the dichotomy “Is this good?”/“Does this suck?” nearly destroyed her ability to do art because she began to see each piece she created as a judgment on her worth as an artist and a human being.

Having spent about a decade of my precious days on earth asking myself similar questions, I wish I could help my students avoid this particular creative death spiral. I tell them that practicing any sort of art is a long process and that they are at the beginning of the process. I tell them that the course will occupy only a few weeks of their lives, and I warn them against using these weeks as an oracle that will tell them whether they should keep writing or not. I tell them, too, that I make a point of not answering questions about my opinion of their potential.

The more I write and slog through the uncertainty of writing, the more I realize that Barry’s two questions are the very last ones I should be asking because they’re just not relevant to the work itself. I have been told all sorts of things about my writing – everything from “You’re not James Joyce” to “I don’t see why you would care so much about things that aren’t even real” to the coveted “This is very strong work” – and nothing anyone has said has made much difference to my confidence level. (In one of my first college writing workshops, on the other hand, the professor recounted an incident from her own college years, in which an embittered professor told a student, “If I wrote like you, I’d slit my throat,” which almost certainly would have had an impact – but I desperately hope that story is an urban legend.) In response to various negative reactions and rejections, I’ve spent long periods of Not Writing, but I have always gone back to it eventually; and when I have received praise and encouragement, I’ve glowed for a few days and then spent weeks and months convinced that I would never write anything good ever again.

Like I said: creative death spiral.

Every time I begin to write, I start at zero. I feel that I am not just inventing a story, but myself as a writer. It as though I have to relearn everything I have ever known, every single time. I have to accept – again – that what I have to say, should I even succeed in saying it, may not be worth saying. I may be a better writer than when I started out, but that doesn’t mean I won’t write something terrible, and I am fairly sure I will fall far short of what I wish I could write. If I want to keep going, I have to embrace zero and everything it doesn’t mean. I have had to stop believing that my feelings have any relationship whatsoever to the quality of what I produce. I have to focus on the work itself, not ponder whether it is any good.

Lynda Barry’s comic dramatizes her search for “what is missing” in her art. In the last frames of the strip, she is taunted by ghosts whose frenzy increases the more she resists, until she inadvertently cries out the answer: “I don’t know!” and liberates her work from questions of meaning and worth.

Inevitably, my students will ask themselves the two questions no matter what I say to them, just as I did in my first writing class and for many years afterwards; and some students will read every comment they receive as though it’s a prophesy of what is possible. Some will become angry when what they think of as the oracle suggests that years of practice may stand between them and instant brilliance. I can’t stop my students from wanting answers to the question, “Do you think I’m any good at this?” any more than I could stop myself from asking the same thing when I was in my first workshop. But just because I’ve had – and continue to have – my own struggles with Barry’s lesson doesn’t mean I can’t try to bequeath it to my students.

At my college, the creative writing faculty have been charged with coming up with a way to measure what students learn in art and performance classes they take for general education credit. We had a spirited discussion about what was attainable in one beginning writing course, but we all agreed that it was not reasonable to expect a piece of high artistic quality the first time through the process. None of us, I suspect, are as good as we would like to be, which gives us common ground with our students. The difference is that those of us with more experience have by now swapped our fantasies of genius for a long, lonely march along an unmarked path through unmapped terrain, in search of a hypothetical treasure that may or may not have value. This expanse of untrodden mystery, however, is what freedom actually looks like.

Take it from someone who doesn’t know.

Caution: The Moving Walkway Is Ending

Early one morning a little over a week ago, the DC Metro deposited me at Reagan National Airport, where I would depart for an intensive fiction workshop in San Francisco. Only a few months had passed since my last flight from Reagan, but I had already forgotten the familiar robo-female voice that met me at the airport entrance before I reached the moving sidewalk, repeated its message ad infinitum, and followed me around for days afterwards: “Caution! The moving walkway is ending!”

If a message repeats itself that many times, it functions something like an advertising jingle or a mantra. It snakes into ordinary thoughts and insinuates itself into travel destinations. Eventually, new, unintended meanings stick to it like burrs on a tube sock.

In my case, the prickly tube sock has morphed into a metaphorical statement about the second week of May, the last of this academic year. The moving walkway – something like a tunnel, on which I’d stepped last August, accelerated in a predetermined direction, and then landed in the precise spot the engineers intended – was ending. For months, I’d sped through most days, hopscotched through classes, workshops, conferences, committee meetings, planning, mentoring, and grading, constantly sprinting toward the next point on the calendar.

After all the uproar about workload at Montgomery College, I am not going to mount a defense of summer, which for me will include teaching an online class, serving on a couple of time-intensive committees, co-facilitating a workshop, helping in academic advising, writing an article or two, and, it now seems, helping to compile a handbook for faculty teaching transfer composition. In other words, I will be working this summer. But what I won’t have, at least most of the days, is the moving walkway of obligation to appear in person, dressed presentably, at a specific time and place.

Yes, three months of modified entropy is a luxury. And yes, I will be getting paid for most of the work. However, I learned more about fiction in my four days in San Francisco than I probably have in all my years of writing, and more than anything else I am grateful for the opportunity to be a writer for a couple of months. Among the things I love about teaching is the chance to counterbalance the self-absorption required for writing with work that has a direct and immediate benefit to others. In other words, one of the advantages of a moving walkway is that I have a destination, a clearly marked path, and an arrival time: everything my writing is (usually) not.

It’s time I embraced potential uselessness, fruitlessness, pointlessness, and aimlessness, at least for a little while. It’s true I may get lost, but it’s also true I may end up somewhere the moving walkway can never take me no matter how fast I run.

Mommy Issues and the War on Teaching Faculty

First of all, thank you to everyone who read, forwarded, and commented on “The Shelf Life of Total B.S.” I am awed and honored.

When I wrote my response to David C. Levy’s salvo against teaching faculty, I expected that its readership would be limited to the same dozen or so long-suffering friends who’d hung on for the last few entries. I had even thought of retiring the blog, and I might have done so were it not for the encouragement of these readers.

I would absolutely never have predicted that journalist Kaustuv Basu would call my office the next morning to interview me for an article in Inside Higher Education – my first thought was, “Do these people know what a nobody I am?” – nor that my blog entry would gain support from higher ed colleagues across the country, and certainly not that I would seem worthy of ridicule in Gawker.

The Gawker article, “College Professors Find Plenty of Time to Be Outraged About Being Called Not Busy,” was dwarfed by a photograph of a balding, disheveled white man evidently snoring in a recliner, cat by his side:

True? Untrue? It doesn’t matter. (Except to academia [=boring].) When it comes to winning these public debates, all that matters are the “optics” of the thing. From Inside Higher Ed:

Jill Kronstadt, an associate professor of English at Montgomery College, was in the middle of grading papers Sunday when she came across a Washington Post opinion piece questioning whether college professors work hard enough.

She was upset.

Kronstadt spent the next few hours writing a rebuttal to the piece

“I am so outraged about your piece insinuating that I do not have way too much work to do that I just stopped doing my little bit of work and spent hours crafting a response to you, because hey, I have the time for that,” is what I imagine her intro said.

Apart from author Hamilton Nolan’s not bothering to link to – or, it seems, even read – my response, and apart from the fact (which I emphasized to Basu several times when he interviewed me, but which he nevertheless misrepresented) that I finished grading and then wrote the blog, not the other way around, I find a much bigger and arguably more sinister message.

Since when does it show a poor work ethic to take a few hours on a Sunday to do something not strictly work related? The underlying assumption is that teaching faculty are not working hard enough unless they are working every single minute of every single day and weekend. On the other hand, Levy’s article argues, “The faculties of research universities are at the center of America’s progress in intellectual, technological and scientific pursuits, and there should be no quarrel with their financial rewards or schedules.”

Levy’s Ayn Rand-like contention that researchers and not teachers are central to national prosperity – carrying with it the idea of trickle-down prosperity rather than robust education for all – is arguable at best. In Levy’s formulation, researchers deserve unquestioned reverence, whereas teachers, teaching teachers, should be followed around with stopwatches. But why is the stereotype of Ivory Tower slackers so enduring?

In pondering this question, which Basu also posed to me in our interview, and to which I then had no answer, it occurred to me that there is another group of people who are disparaged and even hated unless they work incessantly, give infinitely, and sacrifice endlessly without crass hopes for things like compensation, appreciation, or societal supports. And, in the likely event that life is not 100% certifiably perfect, members of this group are the first ones assigned blame.

That’s right: mothers.

It so happens that Levy’s double standard falls along gender lines. According to a 2006 study, “AAUP Faculty Gender Equity Indicators,” full professors at doctorate-granting institutions – the faculty Levy singles out for particular reverence – are only 19.3% female even though women earn nearly 50% of doctoral degrees awarded. At community colleges, by contrast, women compose 50.8% of full time faculty and 51% of part time faculty.

The gender breakdown of K-12 teachers, however, dwarfs the disparities in higher education. A 2006 Harvard University report, “The Segregation of American Teachers,” states that women occupy 75% of the teaching positions in public schools. Based on these statistics, it doesn’t seem like a big leap to say that the word “teacher” conjures images of women, and the word “professor” elicits images of men. A 2000 article in Teaching Sociology (Oct 2000: 28.4) confirms this suspicion. Perhaps coincidentally, the public has assigned the majority of the blame for the higher education crisis to K-12 teachers, with undergraduate faculty making rapid gains, as documented in the oft-quoted book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.

In fact, many studies have documented gender bias in student evaluations of faculty. For example, one study conducted by researchers at Harvard University, Clemson University, and the University of Virginia found, “In biology and chemistry, male students tended to underrate their female teachers, but female students did not. In physics, both male and female students tended to underrate their female teachers.” An October 2008 article in Political Science & Politics, “All-Knowing or All-Nurturing? Student Expectations, Gender Roles, and Practical Suggestions for Women in the Classroom” (41:4) lists multiple studies showing gender bias and offers advice to female faculty for mitigating the effects of this bias on their own evaluations.

These many student evaluation and demographic studies seem to imply that systemic gender bias is a factor in perceptions of the value of teaching faculty. In my cursory, inexpert view, attacks on educators and educational institutions seem to be directly proportional to the percentage of women in these institutions. If students unconsciously expect their female professors to act like mothers, it seems plausible that the average unreflective, media-saturated member of the general public would impose his or her expectations of mothers onto teaching faculty as a group.

Gender bias could also explain how Levy’s unqualified endorsement of research over teaching faculty found publication despite a lack of factual and logical support. Men contribute to society; women nurture. Male faculty conduct important research; female faculty teach.

It is true that we have a higher education crisis. Enrollments have skyrocketed, particularly in community colleges like Montgomery College, and counties and states, who have lost revenue in the economic downturn, have underfunded education, and especially higher education. Consequently, the cost of education has been offloaded onto students in the form of increases to tuition, class size, and hiring of underpaid part time faculty (a population which, incidentally, tends to be balanced by gender).

Recently, we have seen the devaluation of women play out everywhere from Arizona’s legislative attacks on contraception and reproductive choice to Hilary Rosen’s spurious claim that Ann Romney never worked a day in her life. If students routinely perceive female faculty as less competent than males, is it wrong to wonder whether the public perceives female-dominated institutional roles to be less valuable than male-dominated ones? And, as we try to control education costs and improve outcomes, are we letting societal mommy issues obscure the real solutions?

The Shelf Life of Total B.S.

With self-appointed vigilantes gunning down unarmed teenagers, elected officials rushing to pass laws enforcing repression of women’s rights, a spring so surreally warm in the eastern half of the country that the blooms have come and gone like time-lapse photography, CEOs who earn 327 times the wages of average workers (at least those that still have jobs), a decade of endless war burning through the national budget, civil war searing the Middle East, et cetera, it is hard to understand why David C. Levy has singled out my higher education colleagues for scapegoating in his editorial, “Do College Professors Work Hard Enough?”

His editorial, which appears in this morning’s Washington Post and was apparently printed in a smattering of other newspapers around the country, blames the rising costs of higher education on the supposedly cushy schedules and salaries of faculty. Levy, who defines himself as an “educator,” does not list a single teaching position in his entire biography. David C. Levy is a former director of Washington, DC’s Corcoran Gallery and is now president of Cambridge Information Group, a firm best known for acquiring companies in the information industry – including ProQuest, a staple of library databases, and Sotheby’s.

Even if I were to grant that Dr. Levy is a credible source on workload in higher education – which I don’t – his argument rests entirely on factual errors and unsound logic that wouldn’t pass muster in a student paper. For example, he singles out my institution, Montgomery College, as an example of what is supposedly wrong with higher education:

Maryland’s Montgomery College (an excellent two-year community college) reports its average full professor’s salary as $88,000, based on a workload of 15 hours of teaching for 30 weeks. Faculty members are also expected to keep office hours for three hours a week. The faculty handbook states: “Teaching and closely related activities are the primary responsibilities of instructional faculty.” While the handbook suggests other responsibilities such as curriculum development, service on committees and community outreach, notably absent from this list are research and scholarship.

Okay. First of all, only 50% of the employees at MC are teaching faculty, according to the same page Levy cites in his $88,000 figure. What the website doesn’t say, but which would have been easy for Levy to find out with even cursory research, is that of those, only about half are full time, and of those, few are full professors. (The starting salary for an instructor is 56,000.) Interestingly, he does not attribute any higher education costs to our having 20 vice presidents, 11 of which were added in the past year. In the meantime, faculty and staff are heading into our fourth consecutive year without a pay increase, and tuition will be raised yet again.

Having misstated salaries and composition of the MC workforce, Levy goes on to offer distorted information on faculty workload. His contention that full time faculty only spend 15 hours a week teaching is especially outrageous. Levy writes: “Even in the unlikely event that they devote an equal amount of time to grading and class preparation [as they do to teaching], their workload is still only 36 to 45 percent of that of non-academic professionals.”

First of all, for most faculty, teaching “15 hours a week” means teaching 5 different classes, most of which have at least 25 students. In my department, we routinely spend 20-30 minutes commenting per student essay – and easily double that on the 8-10 page essays in transfer composition. We assign five essays a semester, minimum. Although I’m not a math whiz, my calculator says it adds up to 200-325 hours per semester on grading alone. For a 15-week semester, that’s an additional 13-20 hours a week just on grading. That’s not counting office hours, meetings with students outside of office hours, or prepping. If Levy thinks he can do a good job teaching without spending at least a couple of hours outside of class for every hour in class, he has no business calling himself an educator – and, based on the inaccuracies this essay, it’s clear that he needs to spend a little extra time fact-checking what he puts in print as well.

As for the “curriculum development, service on committees and community outreach” our faculty handbook “suggests,” Levy might not realize that these activities are not only part of our evaluations – in other words, that would-be slackers still have to participate – but are intrinsic parts of ensuring that our students learn. In an average week, most of us spend at least a few hours in committee meetings and a few more hours doing work for our committees. We engage in professional development so that we can be more effective in the classroom. And some of us, despite a lack of financial support from our institutions, still find time to engage in scholarship.

Nevertheless, none of these things are what I feel I do.

Most community colleges have open enrollment, which means that anyone with a dream of going to college can come through our doors and get an education. Seventy percent of community college students are considered “nontraditional,” meaning they have families, work more than 20 hours a week, and/or were out of school for a few years before they came back. Around half are “underprepared” for college coursework as determined by placement testing; but a large percentage of those whom the tests deem “prepared” still struggle with a variety of competencies necessary for success, including academic vocabulary, college-level reading skills, study habits, and communication skills. On top of the academic challenges, we regularly have students who routinely deal with hunger, health problems, homelessness, lack of childcare, legal trouble, family problems, and lack of funds.

What our students also have, though, is the will to change their lives despite – and often because of – all these obstacles. I know I speak for many of my colleagues when I say, put simply, that I am honored to teach them. Our goal is to help students meet their goals, regardless of their preparation for college work. We don’t just teach classes; we teach individual students. Helping every student succeed takes a lot more time, and is a lot more worthwhile, than showing up in the classroom for a few hours and then vanishing. As one of our former students put it (AsperGirl, posting at 8:31 on March 25) in her reply to the Washington Post article, “I frankly got a [sic] better teaching at the community college. The professors pay more individual attention, work harder to communicate their vision and love of their craft/study and make efforts to make more extracurricular time and activities for their students. Frankly, at UMD there were few professors at UMD who didn’t begrudge students even the time allocated to office hours, as if their time was too valuable to spend with the grimy hordes.”

The idea that teachers get away with being overpaid slackers is a fantasy whose popularity endures despite abundant evidence to the contrary. I am sure it must be more appealing to blame teachers, with whom we’ve all had personal experience, rather than one-percenters or budget-cutting legislators, who seem to be protected by a bubble reserved for the already wealthy and powerful: people like David C. Levy, who has published an editorial that relies on speculation and cherry-picked support but taps into ignorance and prejudice.

We could follow his advice to increase the teaching load, decrease salaries, and cut education budgets even more than we have already, but since the education funding problems really come from legislative cuts and budget freezes, bloated administrations, and skyrocketing enrollments, we’ll see little, if any, improvement to the funding situation. Meanwhile, faculty’s effectiveness will come up against our natural physical limits. Privileged one-percenters like Levy will buy their kids’ way into institutions that support quality teaching, and those students who can only afford public college will suffer.

I am sure we can find Levy a job as an adjunct instructor so that he can see firsthand how actual faculty spend their time. He might even be a better “educator” once he does some genuine teaching instead of sitting in an office orchestrating media mergers. Don’t get me wrong – community college teaching is a dream job, but only for the right sort of person. My guess is that Levy wouldn’t last a semester once he realized how different our jobs are from the outright fantasy he has constructed for the Post.

In the meantime, let’s call Levy’s argument what it is: bullshit.

Lessons from the First Decade

The Friday before last, I celebrated the tenth anniversary of the first class I ever taught. Well, to be perfectly honest, I thought about celebrating – in between answering email, grading essays, and scrambling to finish three separate projects by their deadlines – and wished I had time to blog in honor of the occasion.

People seem to have a widespread misconception that, unlike in every other profession, good teachers spring into shape like instant Ramen rather than going through a period of training, learning, and sometimes-painful introspection. As a mentor and superb teacher who had been in the classroom more than twenty years told me, “My first year, I thought I did pretty well. Then after a few more years passed, I thought, ‘Well, the students learned in spite of me.’” Even though multiple colleagues told me I was “a natural,” I still had a huge amount to learn. I assume that once I’ve taught two decades I will look ruefully back on how little I knew after my first one, precisely because experience matters. Here are some of the (hard) lessons I’ve learned so far.

10. Don’t put policies in your syllabus that you don’t have the heart to enforce. During my first year teaching, I tried to strike a balance between the faculty who wanted me to impose military-style discipline (there were a lot of veterans at my first job) and those who told me, “But your emotions are part of your pedagogy!” Classroom management is like training a cat: either be consistent, or just let the cat take charge.

9.  It’s best to be gullible. I am an English professor, not an FBI agent. I prefer to believe what my students say, even if it is likely that they are not telling me the truth. And, if I can’t prove that a statement is untrue, it’s best to pretend to believe it. The most outrageous example occurred when a student known to be a compulsive liar claimed to have a brain tumor. When he showed up at class, seemingly unable to walk without assistance from other students, I took his word for it. One of my colleagues, on the other hand, required medical documentation. By the next class, he was fully recovered. However, I would not have wanted to be the one to say “I don’t believe you” to someone with a serious illness.

8. Most plagiarism is accidental. When I learned to cite sources, there were more or less only three kinds we were allowed to use in essays: books, magazines, and newspapers. Today’s students are exposed to literally hundreds of different genres, some of which themselves contain plagiarism, sampling, and remixing. The idea that ideas as well as words can be plagiarized comes as a particular shock when I cover academic integrity. While some students flagrantly copy whole papers and hope to get away with it, most are genuinely confused.

7. There is no such thing as review. You are either teaching – as if students have either never learned or have forgotten what you’re talking about – or reinventing. One of my worst-ever teaching mistakes (Fall 2004, my first time teaching developmental English, is burned in my memory) involved rushing through material I thought students would know if they had met the course prerequisites. It took us about a month to recover, but I never made that mistake again.

6. Less is more. One of my favorite student comments of all time (I think it was Winter 2004) came during the class before an essay was due. I knew some students had been confused by the assignment, but I had explained it multiple times and thought they now understood. About a third of the way through class, though, one of my most conscientious students asked, “I know you have said we need to include X and Y. But what are we supposed to do in this paper?” Oops.

5. Don’t work harder for your students to pass than they do themselves. As I have mentioned, I teach at a community college, and many students face serious obstacles to completing an education. There’s a fine line between reaching out to a struggling student and, well, overreaching. Films about teachers often focus on recalcitrant students who respond to a teacher’s caring and mentorship (Good Will Hunting, with multiple people chasing after the troubled-genius janitor played by Matt Damon stands out especially), but in real life, I have found that if I put more effort into the student’s passing than the student herself, outcomes are almost always bad no matter how noble my intentions. Consequently, I have learned to let passing be the student’s accomplishment, not mine.

4. Teaching is the fun part of your job. Committee work is the price of admission to a classroom, and there is no better antidote to frustrating college politics (or, for that matter, exhaustion, aggravating personal situations, etc.) than an hour spent teaching students.

3. Dress for the mess. I truly admire my colleagues who can wear white to work and not stain it with coffee, dry-erase markers, ink, copier toner, or any of life’s other little accidents. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I actually have colleagues who wear white to work. Public speaking may be the most common phobia, but even faculty who get up in front of people every day don’t want to feel like the spotlight is on…spots. Prints and layers are good. Black is usually good unless you are teaching with old-fashioned chalk, in which case you’ll look like you’ve been in a paintball fight by the end of class.

2. Leap. Even a well-planned class can sometimes go awry, and at such times, you are lucky to be in a profession where you can change direction without warning or approval.

1. Don’t let what you’ve learned override your passion. When I was a new teacher, I had love for my subject, but no experience. Once I had some experience, I became obsessive about getting class right – being structured, sequential, and clear – and not leaning on spontaneity when I should have good planning. While these goals were all worthwhile, I realized last summer that, somewhere along the line, my perfectionism had led me to leave my passion at the door when I stepped inside a classroom. This year, I realized I’d come full circle: my magic ingredient was the one I’d had with me all along.

I feel like I could easily come up with several dozen more lessons. So, colleagues, what bits of hard-won knowledge would you include on your list?

Gladly Beyond: A Place for Literature

The e.e. cummings poem that begins, “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond/any experience,your eyes have their silence” and ends “nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands” is unabashedly about love: The poem figures prominently in Woody Allen’s film Hannah and Her Sisters and was swapped between lovers in my college dorm. The idea of finding the one person whose looks can “unclose” you seduces anyone capable of undressing in the throes of a soul-mates fever dream.

Nonetheless, the lines of this poem – which seem so tenderly meant for a lover – immediately sprang to mind when, preparing for the beginning of the semester last week, I thought about how to articulate my love of literature to my new students. Reading: so much like the unfolding between cummings’ lovers, only exponentially more promiscuous. Every work of literature opens its own universe. I have only one bricks-and-mortar life, but literature gives me thousands of consciousnesses in hundreds of times and places. Each book uncloses me, transports me out of myself and into lives that are absolutely, impossibly not my own.

When I talked to my students that first day, I shared the reasons for my passion for literature and saw that my students appreciated my love of my subject but did not share it. Seeing their skepticism, I dutifully trotted out the pragmatic reasons for careful, thoughtful reading and how they might apply to the career aspirations of the students in the class, but now I regret falling back on salesmanship.

Literature, it seems to me, is the antithesis of the agenda embedded in public discourse, of social networking and Web 2.0, of everything on demand 24/7. At least in the United States, we live in an age that exalts the individual; we devote more and more of our ingenuity towards customizing our own experiences – in other words, to limiting awareness to what we have already imagined and requested. Even in education, we judge success through measurable outcomes and whether college has conferred skills that mean something in “the real world.” On our separate phones and laptops, all password protected, we can choose the apps we want, the news sources whose views we espouse, and the people who share our own interests.

I think about the trouble some students have with reading – in 2011, only half of students had ACT reading scores predictive of college readiness – and I think that at least part of the problem is that reading demands that we enter someone else’s consciousness, that we desire to understand what is inaccessible to us and learn to decipher it. The hyperlinked Web 2.0 world, by contrast, privileges the self over the other and rewards predictability, even customizing ads and offers based on a user’s browsing history. Rather than the practice of reading being an act of seeking, in the hyperlinked world it becomes an act of receiving, as Netflix puts it, “More like this.”

Literature, on the other hand, entices us from our own separate worlds into someone else’s, “whose texture/compels me with the color of its countries.” Reading, at its best, keeps us from emotional and intellectual celibacy. It gives us thousands of eyes, all unclosed, and, as we turn the pages of a book, allows us to transcend our own small hands.

The Other Side of the Fence

As I cleaned my office in preparation for the start of the semester, a small yellow slip of paper somehow rose to the surface: a parking permit request form from Highline Community College in Des Moines, Washington, where I spent my first and last quarters as an adjunct. The paper bears my old zip code and the license number of a 1991 Civic hatch that most likely no longer runs.I will leave for another blog entry the story of how I came to leave the Civic in one Washington when I flew off to the other one, but finding an artifact of my adjunct days seemed especially fortuitous this week.

It has been sort of a big week for me. About ten days ago, a wonderful teacher and colleague announced that he would be resigning to follow his wife to the Pacific Northwest. He was the coordinator for our transfer composition and literature courses, which involved mentoring and overseeing nearly thirty adjunct faculty members, conducting assessments of our learning outcomes, reviewing course descriptions and requirements, and working with department chairs and coordinators on our college’s other two campuses.

Those duties have now fallen to me. Nearly ten years have passed since the first day I strode to the front of a classroom, saw a row of faces aimed in my direction, and thought, “Wow, they’re looking at me like they think I’m a real teacher. I guess I’d better teach.”

Similarly, when I went to yesterday’s beginning-of-the-semester adjunct orientation meetings, my part-time colleagues looked at me like I was a real coordinator. Just as I discovered by acting like a real teacher that I could become one, I somehow found myself – despite self-doubt, nerves, hesitation to advise faculty who had been teaching far longer than I have, ambivalence about thinking of myself in a leadership role – unexpectedly transformed from the neophyte who asked all the questions into a professional tasked with answering them.

I realized something amazing this week: To my surprise, I can do the job.

I fielded questions. I commented on syllabi and assignments, offered sample handouts my colleague had left on a disk, suggested approaches that had worked for me, and reassured newcomers. I even said “No” a few times, and nobody seemed to hate me afterwards. I navigated personalities, facilitated discussions, and led a workshop. People treated me like someone who knew what she was doing. It was a little weird.

If I can do the job, though, it’s because of what I have stolen from or have been given by others. When I advocated for stipends for part time faculty who facilitate workshops or serve on committees, I thought of a colleague at Green River Community College who assigned adjuncts to leadership positions for short-term assessment projects and refused to let us work without pay, and I remembered the department chairs at South Seattle Community College who picketed on behalf of adjuncts while I scurried to the parking lot to drive to my next teaching gig.

When a part-timer asked me for help applying for full time positions, I thought of the former department chair who fired interview questions at me, critiqued my responses, and gave me tips on my teaching demo; the coordinator who advised me to learn to teach developmental English and initiate visible projects; and the brilliant tenured instructor who took at least two hours out of her winter break to scrutinize my CV and cover letter. The job search advice I give is their advice.

I think of my fellow “freeway flyers” in our various part-time faculty offices who took hours out of their breakneck schedules to talk through assignments, advise me on classroom management, and let me plunder their best ideas. I think about my first dean, whose response to most of my teaching questions was, “Well, what have you thought about doing?” and an electronics instructor who was my unofficial mentor through the bruising first years of learning to teach. I think of my current department chair, who has tirelessly answered my questions, gracefully negotiated department and college politics, and encouraged me to grow as a professional.

And I thought of the kind words of a colleague who was then a stranger, a compliment that sustained me when I was ready to give up my full-time job search. At the time, I had no idea that a year after I signed that part-time permit request, I would be living on the opposite coast and starting my first semester as a full time faculty member.

This morning, having survived my first week as coordinator, I pinned the slip of paper on my bulletin board to remind me of the generosity of many, many others. I have no way to thank them – except, perhaps, to do my job as they would do it.