Sunday, March 02, 2008

Honing Your Google Reader

Courtesy of Librarian in Black, LifeHack’s “Ten Smart Hacks for Google Reader.”

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Hey! Do You Have Any Money for Us?

Shopping for summer events?  Looking for ways to expand your professional development?  Don’t see any scholarships or grants for adjuncts?  What do you do?

Click to the next page.  Click again.  It appears that they don’t give adjuncts any money anyway.  Click away.

Right.  That is the quick path to self-defeating behaviors.

If you don’t know if there is money, and you don’t ask about money, you are denying the potential that money is there.

Sure, there may not be any cash.  Chances are there is none for adjuncts—after all, we are the overlooked and ignored mass of teachers.

But if we do not ask, if we do not indicate that we are interested in attending, that we are colleagues who can contribute in valuable ways, that we are just shorter on cash than tenureds, then where does the blame fall?

It never hurts to ask.  And what can they say?  No.

So, if more of us ask, then something may happen.  If more of us get involved, and if more of us show interest, then a mass might get moving.  And scholarships and funding and grants might get rolling.  No, this is not equitable pay.  But, it is a step in the right direction.

Step up and ask.  …

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Friday, February 29, 2008

The Passive-Aggressive Grader

So far this term, I have kept my passive-aggressive grader on a leash.  A very short leash.  Soon, I may even try to put my PAG to sleep.  The only problem is that I know a new PAG will be reborn.  I am quite sure that as long as I teach, a passive-aggressive grader will be lurking in the shadows of my teaching identity.  Rather than try and eliminate PAG, and convince myself I am an icon of pure benevolence and compassion to my students, I must work to always be aware and not let the passive-aggressive grader loose.

Just in case you have never met the passive-aggressive grader, let me introduce you to him.  PAG is the one who cuts a few points here and trims a few points there on a smart alec student’s essay.  PAG is the one who sniffs and hunts down comma splices with three or four readings because PAG heard that student talking trash about PAG’s human form in the cafeteria.  PAG is the one who seeks to expose every possible flaw in the hippie kid’s and born-again Christian’s essays because they are vocal about their beliefs.  PAG is the ghost identity in every instructor that gives just enough substance to students’ claims, “They gave me a cruddy grade cause they don’t like me” so that those …

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

100 Posts So Far

This post marks the 100th post I have written for Adjunct Advice.  Some posts are short; some posts are long; some posts are little more than giving props and a quality link.  I like it that way.

So far, Adjunct Advice has served me well.  I can only hope it has also served you, the readers, well.  I have learned a lot about tech stuff and Gmail; I have interviewed a number of exciting, polite, and generous colleagues; I have networked more than I thought possible; I have maintained a pretty regular writing rhythm.  All of these are possible because of this blog.  How can I not be grateful for all those benefits?  And, on top of all that, Adjunct Advice is a little over six months old and has had over 50,000 hits.  That is pretty astonishing.

Equally astonishing is that I have even more questions now than I ever had before.  I am less the total-newbie than I was when I began, but I sense the breadth of my ignorance better than I did before.  This inspires me, and it fuels my lust to know more.

Just as inspiring are the potentials that emerge from this kind of blog.  It embodies efforts to actually engage in change instead of simply talking about it or whining.  While I …

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Monday, February 25, 2008

Another Link for Your Students

It can be exhausting attempting to explain every facet of being a good student to students.  Truth is, it is not possible.  All we can offer are highlights.  It would be grand, yes, if we could record ourselves at our best—when we give our best tips—and then hit “replay” on some cosmic time-loop remote control.  I wish!  So, instead, we are left to repeat ourselves or, hopefully, to find a better solution.

One solution is providing a page of resources for students.  This way you can say, “Did you check out my resource page?  No?  Well, go there and click X! Then, if you have more questions, come see me.” One of the first links I would put up is How-to-Study.com.  It comes to you via props by the Librarian in Black.  Using such sites allows you to cycle the work and efforts put forth by others while enabling your students to ask more specific, detailed, and relevant questions.  Plus, they can go there at 2 a.m. instead of leaving a voice mail on your campus phone.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Just Who Is An Adjunct?

A recent correspondent—a non-tenure track instructor—asked a great question: Are they considered adjuncts?  “Why yes,” said I without thinking.  How can they not be adjuncts?

The more I think about it, the more I realize there’s a lot more involved with the label adjunct than there appears to be at first sight.  For example, many non-tenure track folks have one year contracts.  I know of other lecturers who have three year contracts.  But are they truly equal with tenureds?  Is that laughter?

And that is the point.  As contingent academic laborers, we need to be very careful about who we do and do not consider adjuncts.  Of course, there may be some NTT folks with Ph.D.s teaching at R-1 schools who do not consider themselves as being in the same boat as MAs who are teaching a sixty percent load at a community college.  That is fine and dandy for some; to me that reeks of the same classism that regards NTT as being a sub-species not equal to those with full tenure.  Some colleagues are more equal than others—and some instructors, under that approach, are just not considered colleagues.

When I think about adjuncts and issues surrounding contingent academic labor, the following questions come up:

1. Do you have academic freedom?  Can you really teach and …

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Friday, February 22, 2008

How to Manage Your Time and Get a Book Underway: A Vickie Willis Interview

Like many great resources and people, Vickie Willis came to my attention on the WPA-list.  She issued her Call for Proposals for the anthology Don’t Panic!: The Instructor’s Guide to Assignments and Activities for First Year Composition.  I found the ensuing thread intriguing, and I contacted her.  Fortunately for us, she agreed to do an interview.  I do hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

Please describe your current teaching position.

I’m a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) at Georgia State University, and I teach first year composition.  Even though the position is called a GTA (or TA at other schools), I still have my own classroom, and I develop my own syllabus and course materials (while following our department’s course objectives, of course).

Student-wise, I’m in the Ph.D. program, too, with a primary specialization in Literary Theory, and a secondary in Rhetoric.  I’m currently in my third year at GSU, and I’ve been teaching first year composition for five years.

How did adjuncting encourage you to work towards a Ph.D.?

When I began adjuncting, I still wasn’t clear about where I wanted to go.  I had just completed my MA (in literature, with a focus on Modern and Contemporary American), and I had never taught before.  And once I was in a …

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