Adjunct Project Jobs: This Could Get Interesting

May 22nd, 2012 § Leave a Comment

This morning, I published a piece on The Adjunct Project blog and I want to share it on Copy & Paste, as well. It’s generating a lot of excitement already so I thought I’d spread the word in as many places as possible. I apologize to those of you who will be getting this twice; I just have different audiences at both blogs. The original post is here.

What is the one thing about the Adjunct Project that connects us all to each other?

Yep. We’re all barely making ends meet at jobs we trained for and we enjoy, but yet we can’t sustain livings. The “I do this because I love it” mentality has, of course, been driven into the ground over the years. We’ve probably all said it. Many have just accepted the idea that adjuncting is the best job they’ll get, and thus stick with it. For some reason, I think it’s easy to forget how marketable our job skills are. In case you forgot, you have an advanced degree in your field. You are an established leader with superior research and writing skills, and you’re an expert at “selling” your course to your students. Now tell me how all that adds up to $20,000 a year. Exactly. It doesn’t. Not in any other field, that is.

The other day I read an interesting article called The Ultimate Guide to Finding a Job as an English Major and it really drove this point home for me. The author opens with, “the biggest mistake [people] make is to think that their career options are restricted by the subject they studied in school.” Interesting. I’m listening. He goes on to write a passionate defense of the value of a liberal arts degree and outlines how the skills acquired in these programs translate to life outside academia. It really got me thinking. How many times have you heard: “What are you going to do with that degree? Teach?” Too many to count I’m sure. I know I have. We are inclined to fall into this mindset trap that suggests liberal arts degrees are useless in the “real world.” But it’s just not true at all, as the article’s author points out.

Just to be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that we all leave academia. I know many people couldn’t imagine doing anything else. They’re made to be college professors, and they love it. No problem. All I’m suggesting is that there might be an alternative out there for those who don’t feel this way. A much more lucrative and stable alternative. The same author from above has another article called 35 Awesome Jobs for English Majors, which I also found interesting. After reading it, I started searching job boards and I noticed many of the jobs he writes about are actually in reasonably high demand.

And then an idea hit me. What if we at the Adjunct Project set up a job board that posts positions we’re interested in? Jobs that actually pay a real salary to people with our training and experience. It really makes perfect sense. We’re all underemployed and underpaid. The Adjunct Project is a collaborative of highly educated people who are experienced and passionate. This job board is perfect for both us as adjuncts and also for employers looking for good people who need jobs. So, I spent a lot of time over the past few weeks working on a job board that advertises for both academic and alternate academic (alt-ac) jobs. It has teaching positions, but it also has jobs in libraries, museums, galleries, advertising, marketing, writing, editing, digital humanities, public relations, media studies, graphic design, and, well, you get the point. Jobs for people like us. Just in case anyone is curious what else is out there. Personally, I think just about every job I’ve seen pop up on the board sounds interesting. Which is a lot more than I can say about CareerBuilder or one of those mega sites. The Adjunct Project Job Board is for a niche audience.

Okay, here’s where it gets interesting. I partnered with Simply Hired to create this board and, as a result, they are willing to pay a little for each job that is listed on the site. I’m telling you this because it applies to us all. Sure, I’m managing the site, but we can all benefit from it. God knows we could all use some extra money. The Adjunct Project is now truly helping adjuncts pay bills. For every job listing you refer, you’ll earn 10 bucks. I’ll transfer it to you via PayPal. You can get as involved in this as you want. Anywhere from talking to a friend who manages an advertising firm to asking the local library to actively pursuing an HR department. Seriously. Ten dollars for every ad you refer. A company might place ten ads and you get 100 bucks.

The beauty of this is it allows adjuncts (and others who are struggling to get by) the ability to actually supplement our meager paychecks. If you’re hurting for money—especially over this summer employment dry spell—talk to people you know who might place an ad. You can be as aggressive as you want. Think libraries, graphic design and advertising firms, any place one of your fellow struggling academics might be interested in working. I mean, seriously, if you bring an HR department on board, you stand to make a lot of money. Something to think about. Just for the record, the cost of a listing is a fraction of the industry standard. Talk to me if you’re interested in more information.

Beyond all the money, bringing ads to the board also helps your fellow adjuncts because it increases the size of our net. I really think this could become something. We help each other and help ourselves at the same time.

Of course, maybe the whole ad sourcing thing isn’t your gig, which is just fine, too. You can still benefit from the job board. Bookmark it and check it regularly. You never know when you might find your ticket to a sustainable career. Don’t forget to share this widely. The more eyes on it, the better it will be for all of us.

Oh, by the way, the Adjunct Project website has been getting a lot of updates lately. We now have a real discussion forum and I also embedded the spreadsheet and did some major cleaning up. It’s somewhere around a million times easier to read now. One last thing: if you were following the blog through your WordPress.com account, you will need to resubscribe with your email (the site is now on WordPress.org). This only applies to about 50 people.

Adjunct Project Media Board

May 17th, 2012 § 4 Comments

I feel like it’s time to do a little aggregating. Over the course of this past semester, dozens of articles have popped up all over the country about The Adjunct Project. I was interviewed for many of them. Others I learned about when their referral traffic started registering on the website’s stats. Those of you who have been closely following the project have probably read several of these, but I bet some will be new to you. Either way, this post will be a great place to keep track of the media coverage of our work. Bookmark it. It will also provide a solid entry point for anyone who is new to the project. Direct people to it who have questions. By the way, if you want to drive a little traffic to your blog, write a post that references the Adjunct Project and I’ll mention your blog here.

If I missed any articles or interviews, post it in the comments and I’ll add it to the list. I will also update this list as new pieces are published, so it might be worth checking in occasionally to see what’s happening. You’ll notice I added the date after each entry to keep track of current news. The Google Document also continues to grow—up to about 1750 entries now. Visit the Adjunct Project to see the cleaned up version of the spreadsheet.

Attack of the Robot Graders!

April 27th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Michael Winerip’s recent New York Times piece entitled “Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously” basically just confirms everything we already knew about computer grading. Nothing to see here. Keep moving.

Still reading? Oh. Fine then. The article is about the new “e-rater” by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which can grade 16,000 essays in 20 seconds. Winerip pits the ETS e-rater against MIT writing director, Les Perelman, who systematically disembowels the robot grader and its proponents. Two days later, Winerip appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered to discuss his article. According to him:

The automated systems look for a number of things in order to grade, or rate, an essay, Winerip says. Among them are sentence structure, syntax, word usage and subject-verb agreements. ”[It's] a lot of the same things a human editor or reader would look for,” he says.

Enh! Wrong.

In my grading rubric (and the grading rubric of most contemporary composition instructors), sentence level and grammatical issues are pretty much at the bottom of the list of priorities. Of course, if a paper is riddled with these “local errors” to the point that it effects the paper’s coherence, that’s clearly an issue that needs to be dealt with. Incidentally, these are the students who need a real teacher the most. So, pawning these students off on machines would be one of the most irresponsible educational decisions imaginable. Thus, the e-rater fails the test for evaluating students with real developmental writing needs.

But what about students who are decent writers looking to polish their essays? Well, that’s not going to work either. Papers with only a moderate number of local errors can (and in my opinion, should) be evaluated differently. Personally, I care much more about my students’ ideas and overall structure. Like whether they craft strong thesis statements, transition smoothly, and support their claims with appropriate and well-documented evidence. Let’s see how the computer grader weighs in on these issues.

“You could say the War of 1812 started in 1925,” Winerip says. “There are all kinds of things you could say that have little or nothing to do in reality that could receive a high score.”

Oh, really. Interesting.

As NPR’s Melissa Block points out, “they truly don’t understand what they’re reading.” Because of this, a computer will never be able to effectively evaluate a sophisticated and multi-faceted piece of writing. In order to fully appreciate a student’s writing process, one must be capable of understanding what one is reading.

Aside from that, how can a student be expected to improve as a writer and a thinker without ever receiving any constructive feedback beyond how many commas he misused? What that does is teach a very formulaic, cookie-cutter style. A style free from “error.” A style with no room for creativity or personal voice. Think for a minute about the great Americans who have made this country what it is. Inventors, Artists, Writers, Entrepreneurs, Thinkers. How many of them would you say colored within the lines? How many of them would you say believed creativity was an unnecessary nuisance that should be stifled whenever possible?

Grading is necessarily a dynamic process. It is interactive. Improving student writing requires that teachers enter into conversation with their students. If we really want to make students better writers, we have to talk to them about how to get better, whether that is through comments or in conferences. We can’t just assign a grade and wash our hands. Anyone who disagrees with this either doesn’t care about improving student writing, or is lying to himself.

Personally, I believe the proponents of computer-grading predominately fall into the latter category. Many are administrators who want to streamline the process and make it more efficient and of course, cheaper. Others are teachers who are burned out and tired of grading, which I totally understand. I really do. The efficacy of effectively evaluating 100 essays in a week is equally as questionable. I would love to turn my grading over to computers and have that most difficult weight of teaching lifted from my shoulders. But, I know it would be irresponsible and it would be a disaster to student improvement, so I won’t do it.

I know everyone is up in arms right now about these recent developments in computer-grading, but it just isn’t even something we should be discussing at this point. In the NPR interview, Block astutely points out that she isn’t “sure [she] can see a value beyond speed.” Exactly. Machine grading has absolutely no value beyond speed. None. Surely, this isn’t what it has come to.

Move on. Nothing to see here.

Google Drive–Great News For Google Doc People

April 24th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

Today is a big day for technology bloggers. Google released the long-awaited Google Drive. As ReadWriteWeb writer Jon Mitchell puts it, Drive is “the file system underneath Google Docs.” When you download Google Drive, a little icon appears in your system tray (similar to that of Dropbox), and when you open it, all your Google documents are displayed as files. It looks just like any standard document file except the extension is .gdoc, which is kind of wild. Drive comes with 5GB of free storage, which beats the 2 free GB from Dropbox.

My one reservation is that opening a file just takes you to the docs web page, rather than opening in some kind of offline reading window. This requires you to have internet access to do any work. Google has stressed this is a very early incarnation of Drive; I imagine they will find a way to address this issue in the near future. This rollout alone is enough for me to completely abandon Microsoft Word. And when they work out the offline access situation, the tool will be dominant. So much for blowing hundreds of dollars on a word processing suite.

You all already know I’m a Google Doc guy. If you’ve never used Google Docs, you definitely need to give it a try. The best feature is the accessibility of your work. Composing in any static word processor like Word or OpenOffice requires you to email everything to yourself or, more recently, to use a service like Dropbox to sync your files across all devices. With Google Docs, on the other hand, your document is automatically saved as you type. Anywhere you have internet access, you also have your work. No extra steps needed.

With today’s release of Drive, Google Docs just got even better.  In light of that, I’m considering using Google Docs in my composition classes next year. Have any of you tried it? How did it go?

Moderate Expectations

April 18th, 2012 § 4 Comments

Great ExpectationsGreat Expectations by Charles Dickens

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Is it just me or should this book have ended about 100 pages earlier? The first three quarters were really good, but it lost focus towards the end. It seems like Dickens forgot what his point was and then had to wrap it up in the last chapter. The whole Abel Magwitch side story detracted from the interesting part of the novel, which was Miss Havisham’s manipulation of Pip’s and Estella’s relationship and also the dark exploration of human nature and failed love, to which Dickens returns in the final chapter. I will say though that the Norton Critical Edition had some pretty solid contextual information.

What do you think? I have to admit having only passing familiarity with Dickens, but I’m trying to remedy that. Which of his should I read next?

View all my reviews

This is Why I Teach

April 13th, 2012 § 5 Comments

Right on cue, my students have gone and done something awesome. They apparently anticipated yesterday’s post, making it a good week to return to my teaching theme.

You might remember last semester when I wrote about a new teaching experiment I called “Film as Composition.” It was brand new to me then and it went great, so I used it again this semester. If you’re curious, you should read the post, but the basic idea is my students would work in groups to write, film, and edit a short film. The project required that they create a multimodal interpretation of one of the readings—poem, short story, or play. I hold the belief that this teaches them to think about traditional elements of composition (thesis, transitions, introductions, conclusions, etc.) in a whole different way. Beyond that, they get to add dynamic elements like lighting, sound, and camera angles to their interpretations, or arguments.

At any rate, we’re at that point in the semester again, and this week we have been screening our shorts in class. Just like last semester, I was completely blown away by some of the films. Just some really great modern interpretations of classic works of literature. Although they were all great, I’m going to share with you one with which I was particularly impressed.

This group chose a surprising poem as the basis for their interpretation: Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” which we discussed on the first day of class as a way of entering the world of poetic analysis. This first assignment is really important in my mind, but the group surprised me by choosing it for the project.

In the drafting stage, each group is required to submit a proposal to me before they begin filming. The Pitch. In this group’s pitch they explained to me the plan was to combine a series of brief clips. Each member would film separately multiple short scenes in which they saw “beauty,” and then they would combine the results. The idea was to represent the adage claiming that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and to argue that beauty often exists in simplicity, just as Pound’s poem suggests. The result is incredible. That’s about all I can say. It’s hard to believe the scenes were captured serendipitously in a weekend. The editing, too, is impeccable (it’s filmed on iPhone and edited with iMovie). Watch and see. This, my friends, is why I teach.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

 

And Now For Something Completely Different…

April 12th, 2012 § 4 Comments

For a minute there I almost forgot why I do what I do.

This semester I’ve read story after story of misery from my fellow adjunct instructors. I’ve dealt with haters who have somehow convinced themselves that money is more important than people. Or something like that. I’m amazed by how many people there are who truly believe a full time college professor deserves to top out at $20,000 a year with no benefits. Who knows? Some people are just completely ignorant, selfish, and hateful I guess. The funny thing is most of these people consider themselves to be “enlightened.” Oh well, I’m glad I’m not one of them.

Anyway, it’s easy to start hating life fast if you spend much time as an adjunct advocate. Trust me. This semester has had me about ready to throw in the towel. And I’m one of the “lucky” adjuncts who actually (sort of) makes a living.

It hasn’t been all bad by any means. Some of the bright spots of this sudden publicity include being invited to present at multiple conferences in the upcoming year (namely next January at MLA in Boston), giving almost daily interviews with news outlets across the country, and of course, getting to connect with hundreds of adjunct professors by email and phone. It’s been a wild semester and I am completely wiped out. Doing all this while maintaining a 4/4 teaching load has been…hmmm…taxing. And as much as I hate to say this, I am still essentially exactly where I was at the beginning—barely scraping by as an adjunct, in a mountain of debt, and with no real long term job prospects. A labor of love, I guess we might call it. The thought has crossed my mind that if I were still in the corporate world, exposure like I’ve had this semester would set me up pretty nicely somewhere. But, alas, a broke adjunct I remain.

Okay, so enough of that business. The point of this post is that—as the semester winds down—I am beginning to remember why I teach. My students have kept me going (though they have no idea). They will be the inspiration for my next few non-adjunctified posts. I’m going back to the roots of this blog and talking about things that make me happy for awhile. Like teaching. Those of you who followed this blog because of the adjunct posts: don’t worry—the adjunct thing is still rolling. The Adjunct Project blog will keep you apprised of that work. Copy & Paste, however, is going back to a broader focus. Starting with the next post. I think.

AAUP Georgia Conference

March 27th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

*To my regular readers: This is just an outline for my presentation at a conference this weekend. The Adjunct Pay Chart may be of interest, but the rest is just for my own organizational purposes.

__________________________

Quick Reference for the AAUP Georgia conference at the University of West Georgia on Saturday, March 31st.

  1. History
  2. Press (The Chronicle, Here & Now, NYT)
  3. Adjunct Project Website
  4. Spreadsheet
  5. Georgia Adjunct Pay Chart
    • Averaged when multiple entries
    • Georgia Average = $2523 (w/o GA Tech)
    • National Average = $2949
    • MLA Recommendation = $6800

6. Discussion

That Which We Call an Adjunct…

March 25th, 2012 § 10 Comments

Words are my life.

As a writing professor, I recognize perhaps more than most the power of language. I often dwell on my word choices for long enough to make most people crazy, but I do it because I know how powerful words can be. The perfect word can manipulate connotation so much so that it shifts the tone of an entire piece.

This power of language has been bouncing around the contingent labor blogs lately and it’s caught my attention. The basic argument is that we non-tenure track faculty members have historically allowed our names to be chosen for us. We have relinquished our agency and surrendered our power to choose our own name. As a result, we’ve ended up with titles like “adjunct,” “contingent,” “casual,” or one my personal favorites, “precarios.” It doesn’t take a linguist to recognize that all those names are titles of inferiority. By accepting those titles, we are internalizing the oppression and perpetuating the perception that we are, in fact, less important than our full-time colleagues. Therefore, I propose (as others have) that we reappropriate our faculty status by renaming ourselves in a way that distinguishes us from full-time faculty, but yet does not relegate us to some kind of inferior status by connotation.

I have to admit I’m actually a little bit obsessive about selecting names. I think it might come from my five years of experience in retail management during which I was charged with designing marketing and merchandising strategies that perfectly targeted the consumer mind. Beyond that, a chapter of my master’s thesis was devoted to postmodern branding and the role of the “brand” in the construction of the postwar American conscious. Anyway, the point is branding and advertising happen to be personal projects of mine, so naturally I’ve become really interested in the latest wave of discussion that is seeking to “re-brand” the persona of adjunct faculty.

The new name must be one that, first and foremost, lifts the inferior label from the adjunct profession. We are no longer “a thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part.” We are the majority now and it’s time we have a name that reflects it. So no more precarious job titles. As long as we are referred to in this manner, we will continue to be thought of as such.

Second, I think we do still need a name that distinguishes us from full-time faculty. “Non-tenure track” is too broad and doesn’t really explain the levels inherent even within that classification. The name needs to be entirely different and new, and it needs to be reserved for us alone.

Finally, we need a name that is forward-thinking and suggests the future of our profession. It needs to be a name that sticks and it needs to redefine our role on college campuses. I want it to push administration and others to see us in a new light, one that carries a little more permanence than we currently have.

After much thought, the name I’ve come up with is: Annual Professor.

This title satisfies all three of the requirements I outlined above. It lifts the connotation of inferiority. It distinguishes us from full-time faculty. It carries a degree of permanence adjuncts have never before had. It implies a position that is renewed each year, rather than each semester. Because of this, it puts users of the word in the mindset that this job is much more sustainable and enduring than that of the semesterly adjunct. In fact, I believe it will push administrators towards the idea that adjuncts should be given annual contracts, which would, of course, be a big step in the right direction. Annuals should have contracts that last the entire school year. Makes sense, right?

Some other things I like about this new title are:

  • easy transition from adjunct—both begin with “A” and both have six letters.
  • shortened usage: Annuals
  • highly-tweetable

Like I said, I have given this serious thought—way more than I should have probably. I’m really liking this title, but I want to hear what my colleagues think. What do you say? Has anyone thought about this? Other suggestions? The bottom line is we have got to stop internalizing this aura of inferiority. Changing our name is a good place to start.

Here and Now Interview

March 15th, 2012 § Leave a Comment

My interview aired today on Here and Now with Robin Young. Check it out.

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