Week Ten: Story about a teacher or mentor
Staring down the barrel of life after college, I decided that the real world was a mug’s game—better not to leave. Maybe ever. Instead, I would teach creative writing at a hilly, bucolic liberal arts college somewhere. Yes. And I would hone my writing and inspire others to do the same. Yes!
But you need a Master’s degree to teach college—or so I was told—so I went and got one from Trinity College, Dublin (“the Harvard of Ireland”... there are maybe three colleges in Ireland, but I suppose one of them has to be the Harvard). This degree was 100% financed by student loans, both federally subsidized and private, and I began the coursework right after finishing my undergraduate degree. Some advisors wanted me to take a year off between programs, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I had already accrued a terrifying amount of debt from my undergraduate years, and I feared that the Sallie Mae steamroller would destroy my life if I had to start making payments before I had my Master’s degree.
At this time, my understanding was that Master’s degree = college professor, and college professor = ability to pay off staggering debt in timely manner.
Perhaps you can see where this is going.
* * *
I was hired to teach at two different schools—a state university and a community college. Both hired me a mere week or two before classes started. The heads of each department called me to schedule an interview, which in both cases turned out to be a formality—I filled out the paperwork that same day. They knew they wanted me before I even came in! I thought, exulted.
I was officially a Professor now. I had, at last, arrived.
But now the great crucible began: I had to create a semester’s worth of lesson plans for four college writing classes of varying skill level. (One, evidently, needs “significant publications” before one is allowed to teach the fun stuff. No problem, I thought. That’ll come later.) I wasn’t given any sample syllabi off of which to base mine. In fact, I wasn’t given any guidelines at all—my only resource was the one-paragraph course description in each college’s student handbook. I choked. I procrastinated. I showed up to the first day of class without a syllabus for my students.
The syllabus I finally did squeeze out, I know now, set all of us up to fail. The premise was that no one likes writing essays. Even I don’t! Me! Your teacher! I am just like you, you see, and together we are going to get through this. How? By identifying something we are passionate about, and making that the basis of our essays!
I really believed in this, and was excited to spend a semester shepherding these eager minds in the direction of their best and brightest futures.
Who can say what my students got out of a class with me, but I learned a few things:
It is impossible to write when directed to write about anything.
and
Once you’ve lost your students’ respect, there is no way to get it back.
and, most of all,
A teacher who needs to be liked is an adorable creature bleeding in open water.
* * *
I didn’t even know the names of things. I knew, you wouldn’t want to put a comma there, but had never heard of a “comma splice.” And I had an overly restrictive English teacher’s understanding of proper English: Don’t start sentences with “and,” “but,” etc. Don’t end a sentence with “for,” “to,” etc. (Conjunction? Preposition? Never met the man.)
I couldn’t explain to my students why they should write the way I did; I only knew that no one had taken me to task for my writing since high school, so it must be right. Or correct. Whichever.
It was terrifying. Every single day I felt like a fraud. I was unprepared, mentally and emotionally, but also literally—many days I would just wing it, trusting that pearls instead of stuttering generalities would fall from these lips. I had very little training in pedagogy. I had absolutely no experience with classroom management. My only strategy was this: Be the most interesting person in the room. I was 24, and some of my students were pushing 50. It was embarrassing for everyone.
Sometimes I called out sick for no reason other than that I felt overwhelmed and anxious. I resolved that I would use this brief reprieve to get my shit together, to return all those student essays and actually plan ahead for some reading assignments.
I didn’t do that. I did, however, play a lot of video games.
* * *
Sometimes, not often, a student would request some after-class help. (This never happened at the state university—only the community college.) Her essay was a tangled mess and she needed me to help untangle it, or he was having a hard time finding sources, and I would sit with them and look at what they’d written, having no idea what the hell I was going to say.
Then I would spot a typo and sigh with gratitude. “Well, first of all, that’s actually spelled COMMISERATE,” I would say. “Here, let me just make a note for you.”
“Oh, thanks,” they would say.
“And look here,” I would say, warming to this, feeling no longer like a fraud, “when a quotation is this long it’s called a ‘block quote,’ so you would indent it and remove the quotation marks.”
“Oh yeah...” they would say. “I’ll do that.”
* * *
My colleagues—tenured professors, administrative staff, and fellow adjuncts—had no idea who I was. One guy had been an adjunct professor at the community college for something like 15 years with no apparent hope of getting tenure. He was a published author, though, and well respected amongst the rest of us part-timers. His book was called Ghosts in the Classroom. It was about being an adjunct.
No one had explained to me what an “adjunct professor” was. By the end of my first semester, I discovered that it was like being a professor, except without benefits, respect, or direct deposit. I was paid only three to four times per semester, which meant less often than once a month at one school. If I needed to take a sick day, it came out of my paycheck. (Or it was supposed to. I was such a complete unknown to the administrative staff at one college that they never did dock my pay.)
It meant having no reasonable assurance that you would be offered classes to teach the following semester until, at most, one week before said classes began. Legally speaking, the end of each semester qualified as being laid off, and several adjuncts paid rent or mortgage via unemployment checks during winter and summer breaks.
One time I arrived just as class was starting to find that my classroom had been converted into a breakfast buffet table for staff.
“This was booked weeks ago,” a woman I had never seen or met explained to me. “Weren’t you told?”
Most of my students had already arrived and, seeing that class was cancelled today, left. I took the rest into an empty auditorium, went over a few things, and released them early. Livid, I then marched to the English department and demanded to know what the hell had happened. They had no idea, but weeks later I got an email apologizing for the mix up.
It turns out that, oops, ha ha, they had actually booked the room next door.
* * *
What I imagined was a sleepy, contented kind of life. Rise late, relax over large breakfast, head to foliage-bedazzled New England college campus, moderate intelligent student discussion, gaze out wavy-paned window and ponder my good fortune, settle into my office for student visits and grading papers, head home to my beautifully restored New England farmhouse, kiss my wife and darling children, celebrate new book deal, write late into the night. Rinse, lather, repeat. Bliss.
What I got looked more like this: Rise late; inhale extra-strong iced coffee and junky Sausage, Egg, and Cheese sandwich on the go; spend the two to three legs of my long commute wondering what the hell the lesson will be today; settle into classroom and try to look like I belong at the front desk; try to control the nervous waver in my voice; try and fail to stop babbling, to foment discussion among students about something, anything; check email and update Livejournal while waiting for shuttle or train; spend the two to three legs of my long commute home intending to read or write, or grade papers, but usually dozing instead; gather my things and leave my apartment before my insane roommate returns; spend the night at my then-girlfriend’s apartment watching Netflix movies and getting very drunk. Rinse, lather, repeat.
I did, eventually, start to get the hang of it. My first great victory was understanding the structure of a persuasive essay. Not getting my students to understand it—understanding it, at long last, for myself. The floodgates opened: I began to see persuasive essays everywhere I looked. Introduction leads into point you want to make; build your case point by point; include a counter-argument or two, then disprove it/them; summarize; and then rephrase your opening statement. BOOM. Persuasive essay. Every opinion column or movie review ever written! Don’t you see?
A few of my English I students at Bridgewater actually took my English II class. My elation quickly turned to dread, however, when they sat together and spent the first class laughing and talking over me. It’s true that they were in my class because they liked me, but for much different reasons than I had hoped.
The next class, we had assigned seating.
* * *
Along with a dearth of experience in classroom management and personal organization, I had no idea how grades were calculated. I had always assumed that they were different at every school. I mean, aren’t they? Is 60 a D- or an F? Is 70 a D+ or a C-? You would think this question would be addressed somewhere in the literature the students or I were given, but you would be mistaken.
I got it wrong the first time—I went off a chart I found somewhere on the internet that turned out to be slightly less charitable than the scales most teachers use. (And I hadn’t even considered the “sliding scale,” in which you add the difference between the two top grades to every other student’s grade. I don’t even know why you would do this. Something about adjusting for bias? Making everyone happy? Preventing a violent coup?)
In any case, on the first day of spring semester I brought six final grade correction forms to my department head, with whom I had not interacted since the day I was hired. I was hoping perhaps for a “So how did it go?” or “Anything exciting planned for this semester?”
What he did say, after glancing at my corrections, was “This is a lot of corrections.”
* * *
I started smoking cigarettes toward the end of that semester, April 2006. I was 25 years old, and apart from an experimental puff here and there, had never been or wanted to be a smoker. Basically everyone in my family except my mother smoked, but I shared her convictions about what a ruinous and stupid habit it was. My mother never knew; it would have destroyed her. And I can’t say why I started, except that I felt at a complete loss—nothing else was working for me, so why not try this?
I found it exhilarating, almost meditative at first. I would build in cigarette breaks to my day, and they gave me the buzzed focus I needed to continue grading, or to muster up the courage to go into my next class. Later, I smoked not because it gave me much in return, but because I craved it. I never considered myself “a smoker”—at first it was maybe 5-7 cigarettes a day, max, and I only ever bought one pack at a time, never a carton—and I took comfort in the idea that this was just something I was doing now. I was not addicted, after all, and could stop at any time.
I would continue in this way for the next four years, long after I had left teaching.
* * *
Some days I hit a rhythm where I felt like I knew what I was doing. Some days I ate a bagel in the student cafeteria, nursed a cup of watered down coffee as I worked on lesson plans, and greeted several passing students as they made their way to class.
Some days were better than most days.
* * *
There was laughter, too. And students I loved and who loved me, students who wrote in their end-of-semester review “Don’t let them change you, Prof. Crose!” Some who contacted me a semester or even years later to ask for a recommendation. There was, very likely, more good than harm. But if I could summarize that entire year with one small moment, it would be this:
As finals were winding up and my last semester was winding down, a colleague discovered me making copies in the staff mailroom.
“Hello,” I said.
“Does someone know you’re in here?” she demanded.
“I—... yes,” I responded.
“Are you a student here?”
“No, I teach here.”
“You teach here?” she said, incredulous. And not quietly.
“...Yes,” I said. “For the past year, actually.”
She regarded me for a moment, not comprehending, then said, “What are you, like twelve?”
4 Comments
Reader Comments (4)
I really enjoyed reading this, and it didn't really feel disjointed despite the vignette approach. I had no idea how hellish it can be to be a new professor. Definitely would read more about this, especially the parts where you're trying to fake it.
Thanks, Nick! I will have to unblock those moments from my mind and loose them onto the page for your further reading pleasure. :-)
I agree with all that Nick said. Wow, Brandon, this is impressive not only as a written piece but also as a catharsis, if you will. Thank you for sharing this. I found it inspiring in more ways than one. And, I'm somewhat ashamed that I didn't realize just how trying of a time that was for you. I'm so disappointed in the lack of support you got! And yes, I know I've just broken a cardinal rule (twice) by starting two sentences with a conjunction... ;). Please keep expanding this piece. I think the vignette approach here is definitely a great way to go. PS. Declan writes:tiiejfihmykkejnskfo%
Thank you, Drea. :-) That means a lot to me. If I'm being completely honest, though, I really should have asked people for help that year. That's something I still struggle with.
I know you have your own experiences with teaching -- can't wait to read about them someday (soon?).
And, Declan: Thank you for the kind words. But, please, don't major in creative writing. Take computer science and dabble in creative writing on the side if you must. This is my advice to you. My gift.