Memoir Genesis - The Kernel

Bad jobs set the stage - violence and safety concerns in the classroom

I’ve been an adjunct professor since 2006. But adjunct teaching is grueling, low-pay work. I think there’s another book there. Bad adjunct jobs led directly to my writing life today.

In Fall 2018, I moved from San Diego with my girlfriend to New Haven, Connecticut. She was attending Yale to get her MPH, and I was still teaching freshman comp at San Diego Community College District. My teaching assignments had dried up at three places, forcing me into bankruptcy - the life of an adjunct. I found work at a deli in a grocery store to make ends meet. I taught two in-person classes and one on-line class. My assignments had been rotated from mornings to afternoons endangering whether my classes were enrolled in or not, and thus endangering my paycheck. Priority Assignment Status didn’t seem to apply to protect my assignments when there was variable enrollment numbers and students were flocking to online class offerings. Since I had already been offered one fall online class, I pitched to have a full online schedule for Fall during this transition to Connecticut. They didn’t budge, but I got to keep the one online class. That was disheartening because I had worked for SDCCD since 2006, and there were some teachers who taught fully online. Also, because I taught a full adjunct’s schedule, I qualified for FREE health insurance, which I would lose when I moved. Not something I took lightly for a 50-something year old.

I spent 6 months trying to land jobs in Connecticut from California. Over summer teaching during breaks, I made frequent calls to the chair of the English department at Norwalk Community College. Though he got my voice mails, he was too busy fishing to call me back to connect. I did have a zoom interview at Southern Connecticut State University that went well.

But it was time to move. In August, 2018, with high hopes for a new adventure, we loaded two cars with all our belongings for the week-long drive East. On the first leg, the first two hours of the trip, I got a call from SCSU. They offered me a job for two sections of freshman comp. The over 100-courses taught on my CV counted for something after all. I could breathe easier during this trip.

When we arrived in New Haven, I hit the pavement immediately. I made the drive to Norwalk Community College, a small school in the back of a scenic New England town about 30 miles West of New Haven and 60 miles from New York City. Traffic would be a monumental problem. I dropped into see the chair of the English department. We talked at ease, I looked at the pictures of his fish and his boat, and he was duly impressed with my CV. And yet, even though there was an opening on his staff and he needed to cover a class, he was hesitant at offering me a job. He suggested I try the Development English department. I stuck my head in and spoke with the chair. He was interested and had an immediate need for someone to staff a 6-unit course. But he wanted me to come back for a formal interview two days later.

Two days later, I drove back to NCC to speak with the chair of Dev. English. It wasn’t so much an interview as a welcome to the department chat - here’s what you need to do to get up and running.

I had 12 units of teaching at these two schools, plus the online course from SDCCD. I would be able to pay my bills. I would lose the online class after fall. Because I was teaching 12 units, I qualified for health insurance through the state, but how to get it was convoluted and strict. I had to meet with a certain benefits person and pay by check on a certain day each month. If I missed by even a day, they’d cancel the policy on the spot. It was expensive and didn’t cover much.

I worked like the devil to get these jobs, and the devil repaid me. They were the worst adjunct jobs I ever had. Development English at NCC wanted a babysitter. I couldn’t get into the faculty intranet for a month. No one believed me when I asked for help, that I wasn’t able to access the course materials. The students were mute and unprepared, just out of high school. My supervisor said I was to monitor student progress from my terminal in the front of the room. The students were to work on their essays in class at their computers. I was to watch their writing on my terminal and tell them, “You’re not working, get to work!” I had the ability to take over their terminals from my own at the front of the room. For two hours, three times a week, I was expected to babysit these students as they wrote like that. I developed benign paroxsymal positional vertigo, especially frightening when it strikes when I’m driving in rush hour traffic on a two-lane road at 8:30 in the morning heading toward New York City. On writing days, I touched base with the students through our intranet - they could write without me babysitting them, of which I had doubts was helping their progress. My supervisors, however, didn’t like that I missed class and docked my pay.

The job at SCSU was a nightmare. I had never taught in the East, and students were rowdy, loud, and rude. It’s what you see on television for a high school drama. I had one student who slept in class, an athlete, who claimed he had an accommodation to sleep in class. I had another student, the athlete’s friend, who claimed to be a genius, to have written 14 symphonies and operas, have several patents for biomedical engineering, and written several books. He struggled to write 250 coherent words.

Half way through the term, one student turned hostile. She was a veteran and clearly she was having some issues. But she had taken a dislike to me from the first day of class, pretending as if she couldn’t understand me. She’d sit in front of the class, and when we talked about the rhetorical triangle and pathos/ethos/logos, she’d turn to her friends in the back, “Will someone please explain this to me in English? He always has to use these big words.” She wasn’t doing her work, and I asked her if she was going to turn in a draft and she spun around on me and got in my face. Three days running she let her anger explode right at the end of each class. On that third day, I thrust a desk between us because I thought she was going to hit me. Her friends tried to pull her away and calm her down. Other students took video on their phones. She had been disruptive and disrespectful the entire term. I spoke with the Office of Student Conduct. She was removed from class for a day.

The next week, as I prepared for class, I received an email from the director of the program saying the student had been cleared to return to class. I went to speak to the chair and the director. “There’s no way,” I said. “She doesn’t get to return to class.” We tried to set up a meeting with the student, but the student didn’t show up. The chair explained to me that the Dean had approved the student’s return to class because the student, plainly, “had paid for it.” This school was 20 miles from Sandy Hook, the sight of one of the worst school shootings in American history. I still balked, and I was told if I disagreed with that decision, I was free to file an unsafe workplace report with HR, which I did immediately following that meeting.

I never heard from the Office of Student Conduct again, despite their reassurances that they would keep me in the look for the entire time they investigated the student after the initial report. I never heard from Human Resources. After wrote a letter in complaint, I received a written letter from the Dean that the student was cleared to return to class and deemed not a threat, with no evidence to support such a decision nor addressing her disruptions in class or any concerns for my personal safety.

At that point, I stopped caring about teaching. I rode out the next semester, applied for health benefits through medicaid and sought other work.

Ironically, I received some of the best student evaluations from my students that year.

The year wasn’t over. It was October and I still had to finish the semester.

One day after school, I wandered into a cigar bar in New Haven, CT, the Owl Shop. I had quit smoking years before, but a cigar sounded good. I ordered a bourbon and a cigar and sat on a leather couch with next to a suffused lamp. I opened my laptop, and I started writing. Stories started spilling out, memories, all the dysfunction of my life rose to the top. And then I thought about my brother, who I was always compared to, the hippie turned fundamentalist preacher who suffered major depressive disorder for 13 years before jumping from the Fremont Bridge in Portland, Oregon.

It’s now March 2022, and I’m still writing.

Next time, I’ll tell you what I was thinking about my brother, and how I started the first draft of my memoir.

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I’m preparing my manuscript for the Atlanta Writers Conference on May 6 and 7. I have an April 4 deadline to submit a query letter, a synopsis, and the first 19 pages of my manuscript for review by two editors at the conference. When I first finished my story, my manuscript was a whopping 203,000 words. After a series of serious cuts, my manuscript topped out at 168,000 words, 10,000 of which were notes and appendices. I’ve learned that for a memoir to be marketable, it needs to be in the “under 100,000 word” range. So I started the next round of cuts. Two days ago I merged 7 chapters into 3 and cut 50%. Yesterday, I cut 66% from a long chapter involved many stream of consciousness flashbacks. I started with 23,000 words and cut it to 7,660. My manuscript now stands at 143,287 words.

It’s happening. I will tame this beast.

Have a good weekend everyone!