Life With Boys

Life with boys … this one is a bit about them, but mostly about me … I started teaching “accidentally” more than 10 years ago … picking up a course here, and then since I was already on campus picking up two more … and so it began 100+ classes and 6 universities ago …. and teaching provided me the flexibility to be there for my boys … I could get them to the orthodontist appointments, serve as a taxi from one practice to another, and go to summer camp … even if I did always have homework … and I have loved it …

Today, I needed to go to campus for the first time in a long while … I have been teaching online primarily for this school for a bit now … and as I entered the cafeteria, a little brass plaque quietly gutted me … I almost could not keep going … this little “in memory of” marker on one of a sea of two hundred chairs was perfectly positioned in my sight line and brought me back to one of my darkest days in the classroom … I have been lucky to teach small classes that allow me to really get to know the students … this student had been in one of my classes for three semesters in a row … I was getting to know his story … and at 4:30 in the afternoon he submitted extra credit … in the morning I had an email telling me he was gone … and I had to go into that classroom at 8 a.m. Monday and tell his classmates the news and let them know about the availability of resources to help them cope … many of the students already knew, but I had a few that had not yet heard … and it was devastating … I tried to share a passage from Harry Potter about dealing with grief, but I couldn’t make it through even that … and it still brings me to tears so many years later …

Maybe it is because I am in such a time of transition that it hit me so hard … this week, I found out I would not move on in the interview process for a unicorn of a job – a full professor position …. I am forced to acknowledge I have been diligently serving in a system that has no appreciation for adjunct professors, as we are a dime a dozen … higher ed is broken and no one seems to care … I know this career path is unsustainable. It is so incredibly frustrating … for almost a year now, I have been exploring career opportunities. Still, nothing has worked out yet … and I don’t want to leave the students or the classroom behind … I have been so lucky to explore the world and a vast number of ideas with so many brilliant minds … They have helped me to grow as an instructor and as a person … and I hope I have been able to impart a little bit of knowledge along the way as well … I hope so at least …