A job is not an identity, but it can start to feel like one if you aren’t careful about it.
In May, I quit my job teaching full-time at Washington State University and directing the Writing Center there. I didn’t so much as quit, I guess, as I did just never sign my annual renewal contract, deciding instead with Patrick to launch myself, himself, our cat, and all of our stuff across the country to Nashville, Tennessee without a job lined up—but with a sense of relief from escaping the nuclear waste zone of Richland, Washington and the mess of higher education, even if only momentarily.
Because we live in capitalism, I need a job, though, and so I decide I cannot be above throwing my name in the hat when a couple of tenure-track jobs come available at Nashville area community colleges. In the weeks and months since I applied, I haven’t been offered full-time work, but both colleges have reached out to offer adjuncting positions.
Five hundred fifty dollars per credit for semester-long courses. No benefits or guarantees.
Three quarters of the nation’s college educator population is contingent labor. Part-time adjunct instructors are most often paid per credit, at rates that are disproportionately low compared to the compensation of full-time faculty. A full course load may be four courses each term, but an adjunct teaching three courses might make one-quarter the salary of a full-time faculty member. While tuition rises, more and more of the teaching duties are shopped out to contract workers who want desperately to teach, but who receive low pay and no benefits, and who often drive from one college to the next in a city to stitch together a $35,000 income. Many find out the next semester’s course load the day before or the day of the beginning of term, and if enrollment is low, there may not even be courses available. Post-graduate school, I spent four years adjunct teaching alongside full-time administrative support work, often grading student papers online during my lunch breaks and sending off covert applications for full-time teaching positions from company computers, hoping for a break.
To both adjuncting offers I receive when I arrive in Nashville, I impolitely decline. To the college that flew me out before our move for a finalist interview and campus visit and then neglected to follow up or respond to my inquiries, I send unsolicited student evaluations from the last several years.
You have made a mistake, I think I’m aiming to say—but now I’m not sure if I was saying it to the hiring committee or to myself.
In high school, I knew I wanted to be an English teacher, but it wasn’t until college that I decided I’d prefer post-secondary education to K-12. I liked the idea of not having to be in one spot for a seven-hour day. I liked the idea of having an office where most of your work got done, not a classroom full of desperately developing children for an entire day.
When I finally land a full-time teaching job, it is in a town of 16,000 people in a corner of Oregon that shows up as one of the darkest areas on a light pollution map of the contiguous United States. Friends from my graduate school cohort express surprise and disbelief not only that full-time teaching jobs exist, but that I managed to find one. I begin teaching. I serve on committees. I am asked to take on responsibilities by administrators who make double, triple, quadruple what I make. I sit in my office with my students as they talk, laugh, cry, tell me about their mental health concerns, drug abuse, gender identity issues. I stop writing. I stop baking bread. I write comments on student papers. Grade.
At the end of each semester, I breathe until I am ready to begin again.
The first place in Nashville to offer me a job is around the corner from our house, at a local favorite called Mike’s Ice Cream. I am told I will be making ice cream and eventually baking for the coffee shop connected to the ice cream factory. A half hour before my interview there, I am called by the Department Chair of the local community college where I was invited for the campus visit earlier that spring. She offers me an adjuncting opportunity, to “get my foot in the door” in the higher ed world of Tennessee. I am taken off guard and engage in pleasant conversation with her before promising to follow up via email, which I do—though not in the way either of us had expected.
At Mike’s Ice Cream, I am not making ice cream so much as I am doing manual labor: I follow recipe instructions to pour specific amounts of factory-made ingredients overhead into a machine from which I extract ice cream into boxes that I have made myself; I push 400-lb. racks of ice cream into freezers where it is possible to get stuck and die within 17 minutes; I stop counting OSHA violations by the end of my first shift.
I can’t keep up with the health code violations, either—fruit flies from the mildewy, open drain below the wash-rinse-sanitize sinks and from the laundry basket of rags used to mop up watered down ice cream mix swirl around my head while I extract, and one lands on the spatula I use to coax the frozen ice cream into the corners of the boxes. I watch a co-worker—another new hire, like me—toss an Oreo that fell on the floor over a container of cookies, in which it lands. He picks it out with his bare hands and scoops the Oreos he thinks it touched out with a measuring cup. Another co-worker, the soon-to-be college senior who is training us, refuses to wear a hairnet under her baseball cap and pivots from using her phone to food prep without washing her hands.
I last forty hours in total and make 325 gallons of ice cream that are distributed throughout the city of Nashville with my initials on them. I do not taste any of the flavors while I am there.
On my last day, I sustain a mild concussion when I slip on water in the kitchen and smack my face into a baker’s rack. I want to leave right away, when the lump on my cheekbone swells and turns a dark purple below the Band-Aid I have to put on over my broken skin. My head buzzes, but I finish out the shift and receive the following week’s schedule from my manager via email that evening.
I reply to tell him about the concussion, and that I cannot work until midnight on Monday night and then again at half past eight the next morning. He tells me he put a mat down where I slipped and that he’ll find someone to cover my Monday night shift, but when Tuesday morning comes around, I wake up at 6:00 and find that I’ve left my work shoes on the porch overnight during a hard rain.
When I send the email telling management at Mike’s that I won’t be coming back, I think of the student from several years ago who told me he didn’t have a draft of his essay because his dog ate it. I’m so sorry, but my shoes were wet.
When we first moved to Nashville this May, I stacked the books from my office at WSU in the shed outside, on top of two filing cabinets full of assignment handouts and readings and writing samples. There is no room in our smaller house for them, and I expect I won’t need them in the fall, anyway. Our lease states that we use the shed at our own risk, mostly because it is not secure storage but also because it is apparently filled with spiders, who make themselves evident almost immediately, spinning webs between our rakes and tools and outdoor gear. It is a horrible, on-the-nose metaphor, but it is happening in real-time: the relics of my former, short-lived career gathering cobwebs in a dusty shed.
This September marks the first time since the year before kindergarten that I am unaffiliated with a school in some way, shape, or form. There is no back-to-school. There is no pre-term prep of syllabi and course materials. There is, of course, but I am not a part of it. I feel alienated from the routine set for me since my birth thirty-three years ago: a new year around the sun, a new year in school. But there are different ways to learn, I know, and different things to teach to the world, too.
“You are not your job,” my horoscope says. If my job is nothing, that means I am not nothing. If my job is not teaching, that means I am not not a teacher, too.
