I am truly fortunate to teach at a school that has the whole week off for Thanksgiving. Well, technically, it's not just for Thanksgiving - deer season starts today in West Virginia, and the administration is smart enough to know that the halls would be empty and the classrooms would echo if they tried to open.
And so, I am housecleaning. The good old fashioned kind, where you move all the furniture, and wash the bathroom rugs and shower curtains. I've been doing the kind that my mother called "a lick and a promise," but rarely get back to the promise part.
So far, I've done the living room, dining room, and den. Still to go: kitchen and baths, bedrooms. Make the guest bed for my sister, who will arrive this evening. Clean up after the sick dog (ok, that has to be next.)
And: go in to the office to follow up on a few details for the publication my creative nonfiction class is putting out. Do work on dissertation research I'm participating in. Annotate an entry for a famous publisher of annotated bibliographies in the field.
And maybe, just maybe, get back to my own research project.
So if you don't hear from me in the meantime (and even if you do), have a wonderful Thanksgiving, everyone.
Showing posts with label West Virginia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label West Virginia. Show all posts
Monday, November 25, 2013
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Dog Bites Man
This week, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) published its "Annual Report on the Academic Job Market"for creative writers. It reported just over 100 full-time, tenure-track jobs in creative writing. Yet over 4000 MFAs in creative writing are awarded every year. This is neither news nor new: the gap between creative writing degrees and creative writing jobs has been growing steadily, as my dissertation research showed.
In the report, Dinty Moore said, “I don’t think becoming an adjunct is the ladder you climb if you want a fulltime job with proper compensation.” Again, neither news nor new. Sadly, however, many of us got sucked into that path because we discovered that we love teaching. I am very much aware of how fortunate I am to have a tenure-track job teaching both composition and creative writing.
That said, I did not get my MFA planning to teach. I wanted to write. I wanted to write the Great American Novel. When that didn't happen I sought other options. Eventually I had the opportunity to teach - as an adjunct. Which led to my seven years teaching part-time for three institutions.
Which led me to pursue a PhD - also a risky move. When I had completed my course work, I got my first full-time job. It wasn't tenure track and there was no protection from non-renewal of the contract. When it wasn't renewed, I found another full-time job at an institution with no tenure. It quickly became apparent that there was no job security there - in my last two years there were so many layoffs that the empty hallways echoed.
And tenure is no protection from the massive layoffs happening in public education. Both Pennsylvania and West Virginia (my two home states) have cut funding so severely I believe we should cut the states' names from the public colleges and universities that are suffering.
For me, becoming an adjunct did allow me to get the full-time job (although I'm not so sure about the "proper compensation" part). I did not have a teaching assistantship in my master's program, so it gave me experience. It inspired me to pursue a teaching career. And, again, I got lucky. Very lucky.
I have friends being "retrenched" from the Pennsylvania state university system. I hope they have even better luck. Because education, experience, and ability are no longer enough.
In the report, Dinty Moore said, “I don’t think becoming an adjunct is the ladder you climb if you want a fulltime job with proper compensation.” Again, neither news nor new. Sadly, however, many of us got sucked into that path because we discovered that we love teaching. I am very much aware of how fortunate I am to have a tenure-track job teaching both composition and creative writing.
That said, I did not get my MFA planning to teach. I wanted to write. I wanted to write the Great American Novel. When that didn't happen I sought other options. Eventually I had the opportunity to teach - as an adjunct. Which led to my seven years teaching part-time for three institutions.
Which led me to pursue a PhD - also a risky move. When I had completed my course work, I got my first full-time job. It wasn't tenure track and there was no protection from non-renewal of the contract. When it wasn't renewed, I found another full-time job at an institution with no tenure. It quickly became apparent that there was no job security there - in my last two years there were so many layoffs that the empty hallways echoed.
And tenure is no protection from the massive layoffs happening in public education. Both Pennsylvania and West Virginia (my two home states) have cut funding so severely I believe we should cut the states' names from the public colleges and universities that are suffering.
For me, becoming an adjunct did allow me to get the full-time job (although I'm not so sure about the "proper compensation" part). I did not have a teaching assistantship in my master's program, so it gave me experience. It inspired me to pursue a teaching career. And, again, I got lucky. Very lucky.
I have friends being "retrenched" from the Pennsylvania state university system. I hope they have even better luck. Because education, experience, and ability are no longer enough.
Monday, October 14, 2013
The Complicated Lives of Students in 2013
I received my undergraduate degree - a BA in English literature - in May of 1976. I was not a brilliant student. Duquesne University was too big and overwhelming for me. I was probably a student who would have benefitted from a year off between high school and college. I just wasn't ready.
I came from a low-income family. My father, a college graduate, had died when I was 15, and my experiences were more like those of first-generation college students. I had a horrible bout of depression my junior year, which caused me to get fired from my work study job - ironically, in the campus office that provided counseling.
But in spite of all that, I had a much simpler and easier time in college than my students do.
Because I encourage personal writing in my composition courses and I teach memoir writing, I probably know more about my students than most of my colleagues. I know which one was raped at 12, which one was beaten and locked in a closet by her father, which one's father came out as gay and left his family of six children and a bewildered wife.
My students are mostly first-generation college students. They are either very rural West Virginians or very urban inner-city athletes. The are from low socio-economic families and come unprepared from underperforming K-12 systems.
They are frequently from one parent homes, or raised by their grandparents. There is alcoholism, drug addiction, and jail in their backgrounds.
These are the students who deserve the best teachers, the most dedicated and knowledgable. They need programs like music and foreign language and ancient philosophies - the courses most frequently cut by public colleges and universities but remain a source of pride in elite universities.
Our approach to education at all levels is just wrong. Like corporations and individuals, for colleges, the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. And there's nothing surer than this: The current system will increase the ever-increasing divide between rich and poor and head us for destruction or revolution.
Or both.
I came from a low-income family. My father, a college graduate, had died when I was 15, and my experiences were more like those of first-generation college students. I had a horrible bout of depression my junior year, which caused me to get fired from my work study job - ironically, in the campus office that provided counseling.
But in spite of all that, I had a much simpler and easier time in college than my students do.
Because I encourage personal writing in my composition courses and I teach memoir writing, I probably know more about my students than most of my colleagues. I know which one was raped at 12, which one was beaten and locked in a closet by her father, which one's father came out as gay and left his family of six children and a bewildered wife.
My students are mostly first-generation college students. They are either very rural West Virginians or very urban inner-city athletes. The are from low socio-economic families and come unprepared from underperforming K-12 systems.
They are frequently from one parent homes, or raised by their grandparents. There is alcoholism, drug addiction, and jail in their backgrounds.
These are the students who deserve the best teachers, the most dedicated and knowledgable. They need programs like music and foreign language and ancient philosophies - the courses most frequently cut by public colleges and universities but remain a source of pride in elite universities.
Our approach to education at all levels is just wrong. Like corporations and individuals, for colleges, the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. And there's nothing surer than this: The current system will increase the ever-increasing divide between rich and poor and head us for destruction or revolution.
Or both.
Friday, October 4, 2013
And the Bigger Problem
The use and abuse of contingent labor in academia didn't just happen; it is, perhaps, a symptom rather than the disease itself. Higher education is under attack from all sides, including from within. While Duquesne University is a private school, the labor conditions in public education are often worse. Steven Ward writes that this is no accident. While to an outsider, his words may sound paranoid, as someone who has worked in the field for 14 years, I have seen all of these things in play.
And don't get me started on the idea of free markets and college-as-business. Anyone who knows me knows how I suffered working in the for-profit education world. I watched from within as Goldman Sachs destroyed a formerly prestigious 90-year-old institution. The day its parent company took the stock public and Goldman Sachs bought the controlling interest, it was as if the lights had been suddenly turned off. Layoffs started and eventually included the librarians, the advisors, department chairs, faculty . . . Even worse, we were constantly pressured to dumb down the curriculum and to pass failing students, while support services for our most needy students were being cut. After all, offering counseling services doesn't bring in profits, does it?
None of this is happening in a vacuum. There is an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism, a fear of elitism, and a glorification of the average in our culture today. George W. Bush is proud of his C+ average at Yale. Highly educated and highly intelligent people have been stereotyped as helpless geeks who can't manage their own lives. In television, think about Ross from "Friends," the Crane brothers of "Frazier," and everyone but Penny in "The Big Bang Theory."
The next group to be glorified? Wildly successful dropouts, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (who suddenly knows how to fix education - but that's a story for another day). Early in President Obama's first term, he visited a school and gave a fairly routine "stay in school" speech, and leaders in the Republican party demanded rebuttal time. To say what? Drop out? And that is exactly the message the conservative media landed on: no need to go to school! Certainly Glenn Beck is doing just fine with just a high school degree!
What this ignores, of course, is that in order to succeed without education beyond high school, you need to be incredibly driven or a genius. It helps to be both.
My students who are receiving that message are neither. They are first generation college students in a state that has slashed funding to higher education. Their fathers and grandfathers were farmers or coal miners. Now they believe that there is a future in oil and gas that doesn't require education. And the governor is just fine with that.
In the formerly great state of Pennsylvania, the governor has made no secret of his agenda to destroy public education, starting with preschool and not stopping until the PhD programs are gone.
Combine these state efforts with the high interest on student loans and dwindling resources such as Pell Grants. Tuition goes up, financial aid sources dry up, and students fear (and rightly so) living the rest of their lives under crushing student loan debt. What happens then? Higher education, once considered a great equalizer, the gateway to opportunity for all Americans, will revert to its roots: a place for rich white guys to revel in their privilege.
Sad.
And don't get me started on the idea of free markets and college-as-business. Anyone who knows me knows how I suffered working in the for-profit education world. I watched from within as Goldman Sachs destroyed a formerly prestigious 90-year-old institution. The day its parent company took the stock public and Goldman Sachs bought the controlling interest, it was as if the lights had been suddenly turned off. Layoffs started and eventually included the librarians, the advisors, department chairs, faculty . . . Even worse, we were constantly pressured to dumb down the curriculum and to pass failing students, while support services for our most needy students were being cut. After all, offering counseling services doesn't bring in profits, does it?
None of this is happening in a vacuum. There is an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism, a fear of elitism, and a glorification of the average in our culture today. George W. Bush is proud of his C+ average at Yale. Highly educated and highly intelligent people have been stereotyped as helpless geeks who can't manage their own lives. In television, think about Ross from "Friends," the Crane brothers of "Frazier," and everyone but Penny in "The Big Bang Theory."
The next group to be glorified? Wildly successful dropouts, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (who suddenly knows how to fix education - but that's a story for another day). Early in President Obama's first term, he visited a school and gave a fairly routine "stay in school" speech, and leaders in the Republican party demanded rebuttal time. To say what? Drop out? And that is exactly the message the conservative media landed on: no need to go to school! Certainly Glenn Beck is doing just fine with just a high school degree!
What this ignores, of course, is that in order to succeed without education beyond high school, you need to be incredibly driven or a genius. It helps to be both.
My students who are receiving that message are neither. They are first generation college students in a state that has slashed funding to higher education. Their fathers and grandfathers were farmers or coal miners. Now they believe that there is a future in oil and gas that doesn't require education. And the governor is just fine with that.
In the formerly great state of Pennsylvania, the governor has made no secret of his agenda to destroy public education, starting with preschool and not stopping until the PhD programs are gone.
Combine these state efforts with the high interest on student loans and dwindling resources such as Pell Grants. Tuition goes up, financial aid sources dry up, and students fear (and rightly so) living the rest of their lives under crushing student loan debt. What happens then? Higher education, once considered a great equalizer, the gateway to opportunity for all Americans, will revert to its roots: a place for rich white guys to revel in their privilege.
Sad.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)