Friday, August 7, 2015

Some Final Thoughts on Core Teaching, Adjunct Issues -- LIke Money

     It looks as though there are no Core 201 sections available for me this coming semester. Teaching Core was always a challenge. Imagine teaching the third in a series of classes students found redundant and not relevant. Of course it's not relevant to THEM -- what good is deductive and inductive reasoning and logical analysis when you are a post-adolescent know it all no one can tell anything to? This is not to say that they don't listen intently to professors in their major, but with elective and required classes outside of the major, did they really care?
    With my classes, it certainly didn't seem that way. Being an older (grossly) underpaid adjunct, I think some of these students felt they couldn't relate to me, as though I were from another planet because I was a few decades ahead of them, with kids their own age, for Pete's sake. But we "live" in the same society. My concerns about nature, technology, the future, the class theme, will be their concern too and very soon. We can't "wait" to deal with global warming, the depletion of fossil fuels like oil and coal, the overdependence on computers, smart phones and other technologies, which have kids staying inside and becoming overweight in the process. We need to think about this NOW!
     Some students showed an interest in logical reasoning and the class theme. Most did not, and showed it in their unfavorable class evaluations. Adjuncts, who teach, get to be evaluated by students, who don't teach and never WILL teach, in almost all instances. How effective  and appropriate are these evaluations? How does a student know if the teacher "comes to class prepared" if  this is the first time they are encountering this particular material from this particular teacher? And if you go over major assignments in and out of class three and four times, there will "still" be students who ask, "Now 'what' am I supposed to do?" And these same students, who half zone out or try to look at their cell phones in class, will put on the evaluation form that the standards weren't clear -- well, of course not, if you're not really listening at all in the first place!
     A few may have seen me as an old fogey. Well,  post cancer treatments, I have to admit my thyroid is NOT working all that well and I am not that energetic, making me appear somewhat unenthusiastic to them. But I "am" passionate about the environment! It appears many of them were not, though a handful DID enjoy the nature walks on  campus.
    Being an adjunct can take a lot of hours, and I did have them do "critical thinking logs," but I came up with a pretty good schedule--- but  I didn't do 4 and 5 sections like my younger peers. I just didn't have the energy for it (though I could have used the money).
    Our outgoing president is making (with bonuses like annuities) a half million a year; I made $13 thousand teaching five sections a year, not a living wage if I had to make it without my husband's recent retirement pay. And I was teaching them how to think logically, how to care about the future--- doesn't that count for something?
 

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