#notyouradjunctsidekick

[majoringindebt]

Adjunct Nation 101, folks.

[absolute-discovery-blog]

Social Darwinism and #NotYourAdjunctSidekick

One of my students emailed me about #NotYourAdjunctSidekick. A group of students I have been working with this winter have taken to sarcastically saying to me “you don’t do enough” because I seem to be constantly juggling an inordinate number of tasks, putting off time for my personal life for the school, and don’t seem (given the time stamps of my emails) to be sleeping much. In her email, N wrote, “it seems to me that a lot of the points mentioned regarding this topic do not just relate solely to higher education, but to independent schools as well.” I’d go even further to say that the situation could be applied broadly to teachers everywhere.

So, I tweeted, “because working 80 hr weeks, week after week, should mean that I can pay of college loans without living on credit.” Which felt bold, and like cheating. I’m not an adjunct professor; I’m just a high school teacher. I haven’t earned the necessary credentials to have this complaint.

And then I thought about the heated debate my kids had in history today about social darwinism, a theory I thought we’d successfully done away with long ago. But so many of the kids believe it, like they buy the nonsense about meritocracy that college admissions continues to promote. We have done such a good job of convincing our children that people who work hard, and compete with ruthless abandon get places. They don’t like that this is how society works, but they feel resigned to function within this reality. It’s a dystopian future we’ve told them that they’re living in and can’t escape.

Yet, in my job, working hard and competing isn’t providing me with a better life and more opportunities. And I’d suspect in most teaching jobs, this is true. If you work hard and are good at your job, you’re not given more money, you’re given more work. The best teachers are also the teachers who advise all the clubs and coach sports and have extra help sessions and do hours and hours of invisible work. And yes, some of this comes with marginal amounts of extra pay, but no teacher is ever compensated for the fact that extracurriculars also means overtime. The teachers who can survive in this environment are the most capable, but they are not the teachers who get paid the most. In fact, the better teachers are those who get paid the least and work in conditions far worse than mine but can still be effective. Yet, society isn’t hoisting those teachers up as models of fitness. And frankly, the exhaustion required to do this job well, the financial hardship, and the personal sacrifice mean that I am less likely to procreate because I don’t have time to socialize and be good at my job.

The teachers who get paid the most are the teachers that have been teaching the longest. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favor of merit pay or eradicating tenure until someone has a realistic system for evaluating teachers that takes into account generating curiosity, hope, ambition, love of learning, ability to make students feel safe, known, and challenged. But I do think that there is something wrong with a system that never pays younger talented teachers enough money, and only rarely pays older, talented teachers enough money. And I do think that there is something to be said for why we have bad teachers. Because in this environment, to survive, you have to do less, and be less, or you burn out. Of course we have shitty teachers, there’s no incentive to be good; the “fittest” are laughing at those of us breaking our backs to do good work, just like the “fittest” of the guided age were exploiting workers. Is this the kind of society we want to reproduce? Are these the character traits, values, and ambitions we want to pass on to future generations? If so, sterilize me. Because I must be mentally insane. And isn't that what the social darwinists wanted? To get rid of us weak folk, "for the future of humanity." Didn't someone famous have a similar idea? What's his name? Oh, yeah. Hitler.