Adjuncts

October 31, 2016

“Always Wanted a Career in Education? (Click Here)” by Steve HennPosted by

Steve Henn

ALWAYS WANTED A CAREER IN EDUCATION? (CLICK HERE)

I went into teaching, obviously,
to create a vast network of lackeys
reaching beyond their decades
of graduation to infiltrate communities
with my nefarious values. And to create
yes-men. Yes-people. Yes-women, too.
LGBTQ yes-folk. Equal opportunity yessing.
Everyone can agree with me.
Everyone can do what I say.
When their hands raise in class my lackeys know
the only appropriate comment is “tell me what
to think of this, Mr. Greatest Poet
in the Universe,” and I say, Sally, Billy, whatever,
you’re free to think exactly as I think
as much as you’d like. Sarah. Sam. Whoever
you are or may be—Christ, they stick me
with 120-150 of you whiners per semester,
you’d think God or Allah or the Hindi Elephant God,
whoever’s in charge, ought to know
I’ve got more students in here than I can keep track of.
“Yes, Mr. The Greatest English Teacher in Known
and Unknown History,” my students answer kindly,
gracefully, gratefully. “We understand you,
Mr. Don’t Worry We Love You,” they coo,
they soothe. “We were put here, in your presence,”
they confess, “so that you might be understood.”
An otherworldly glint shimmers in their eyes,
which I choose to ignore; it’s like the palms
of their hands are pushing against my heels—
I go up and up and up, ever onward
into the light, understood, appreciated, elevated,
probing heaven with my hands
as if this were my coronation.

—from Rattle #53, Fall 2016
Tribute to Adjuncts

__________

Steve Henn: “One of the classes I teach in an Indiana high school is a dual-credit IU freshman composition course, followed in the spring by a dual credit IU Literary Interpretation course. I am considered IU faculty as a teacher of the course, and am not remunerated for my services, although the training for it is paid for by IU. The students pay for and earn IU credit for the courses. In that sense, I’m another source of cheap labor for the Indiana University system. This poem was written in the past year, during my second time teaching the L202 course and third time teaching freshman comp.” (web)

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October 26, 2016

“Exercises for Freshman Composition” by Howard FaersteinPosted by

Howard Faerstein

EXERCISES FOR FRESHMAN COMPOSITION

for Mr. Mahedy

A. Define the thesis in the following topics:
Not a day goes by that I forget to wash.
I apologize for being so accessible, if for nothing else.
Walking into the hothouse, overcome by the smell of old love,
treasured and abhorrent memory holds like a tick.

B. Rewrite and punctuate:
what were we doing in the elevator dorothy
lights out hot hands the absence of rebuke
if only the tornado came tonight instead of years ago

C. Circle the prepositional phrases:
Drums, mother of pearl trim, sat in a bedroom corner.
I beat on the bass, high hat, the tightened snare.
Ignored the cymbals.

D. Identify the figures of speech:
(1) You flew from me like a cat when a plate breaks.
(2) Chomping caterpillars re-enact destruction of 2nd temple.

E. Revise the following paragraph, highlighting the relative clauses:
After the beagle fell through the chimney, I lifted her from 
the embers, carried her through the woods where she changed 
into a portable vacuum which I used to clean the trail. Then I dreamt 
of reconciliation when an admission of a dalliance with the Dean 
of Science caused me to awaken, shouting, What a hypocrite!

F. Eliminate the run-on:
Smack in the face of the smart money the shooting guard 
penetrates the paint dishes beyond the arc captures 
the crisp chest pass on the wing and floats one all net.

G. Correct for sentence fragments and misspellings:
I apolagize for being so inaccessible.
And for everything else.
The proffesor complemented me. On my voice.
Her exuberance overmatched mine. Love’s deadly imitation.
In today’s society. We have many problems.
H. Employing critical thinking, write a short essay explaining 
what you’re doing here.

I. Provide the answers:
Who wrote the book of love?
Why do fools fall in love?

For extra credit:
(1) When did Mayakovsky invent rock and roll?
(2) What’s love got to do with it?

Once more for emphasis.
Once again for clarity.

—from Rattle #53, Fall 2016
Tribute to Adjuncts

[download audio]

__________

Howard Faerstein: “Call me Professor F. Call me adjunct. Better still, call me visiting instructor, a title even more denigrating but necessary to meet the lower pay scale. Hired to be a teacher of American youth, I’ve been at it for almost two decades feeding American dreams to bored, sleepy, apathetic not-quite adults as if they’d be interested in Thoreau, Faulkner, Cheever—I should’ve focused on superheroes or why it’s no longer necessary to use apostrophes. There’s a rumor that college administrators will soon be subject to the same corporate out-sizing … wouldn’t that be sweet. But don’t count on it just yet.” (website)

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October 24, 2016

“Almost Holy” by R.G. EvansPosted by

R.G. Evans

ALMOST HOLY

My niece is addicting
mice to cocaine.

The cause is science,
the university is Temple

so it’s almost holy.
Poor little buggers.

Their tickers get to ticking
and pretty soon they dream

that they are rats,
that they can fly,

that they are rats
with wings, pigeons

soaring over mouse and rat,
the god of mice,

of rats, of birds. Until morning 
when they’ll believe

that they are dead.
Then the true god comes

in a cloud-like lab coat,
the resurrection and the life.

I used to dream 
I was a mouse,

but I am only a flea
upon a mouse’s back.

But sometimes … sometimes
the blood’s so sweet

I feel I’m the uncle of light riding
bareback and holy through the temple.

—from Rattle #53, Fall 2016
Tribute to Adjuncts

[download audio]

__________

R.G. Evans: “One of the first questions I ask my creative writing students at the university where I serve as adjunct is, ‘What is your favorite poem?’ I get a lot of ‘The Raven’ or ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends.’ Some try to describe Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken,’ although they usually can’t identify Frost or the title. I don’t mention this as a criticism of my students, most of whom are clever, adaptive writers who delight me with their work throughout the semester. I mention it as an indictment of an educational system that has gone mad pursuing standards and standardized testing while excluding the rich history of poetry available to everyone. At a time when we need poetry more than ever before, it’s my privilege to be able to introduce students to poetry and watch what happens behind their eyes.” (website)

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October 21, 2016

“The Adjunct’s Villanelle” by Anna M. EvansPosted by

Anna M. Evans

THE ADJUNCT’S VILLANELLE

You just come in and teach, then you can go,
she says, distracted by her tenure file.
I wish someone would tell my students so.

From there I leave to meet with one who’s slow
to understand the work. It takes a while
to teach him what he needs. Then, I can go.

Another texts: the fetus didn’t grow.
She’s on bed rest for weeks. Can I compile
the work she’ll miss? I can, and tell her so.

Two student emails wait: one’s in a show
and really wants me there. Good kid. I smile
and write back saying I’ll be thrilled to go.

The second wants a reference. Just say no,
I’m told. I could, but cannot reconcile
this with the student I remember. So,

the one whose mom died doesn’t need to know
my story, how I have to swallow bile
when I hear how I come, and teach, and go.
I don’t. I wish someone would tell them so.

—from Rattle #53, Fall 2016
Tribute to Adjuncts

[download audio]

__________

Anna M. Evans: “Although this poem is the first and only I have so far written to address the subject of my work as an adjunct professor at Stockton University directly, my job affects my poetry in subtle ways. I have become a crusader for social injustice and that is a thread that runs through my poems. I also see social media as the battleground in which these issues will play out and have worked hard to understand it.” (website)

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October 19, 2016

Five Haiku by Aubrie CoxPosted by

Aubrie Cox

FIVE HAIKU

 

DUI checkpoint
dashboard Mother Mary
bathed in light

 

 

 

chum sink caution tape washes in with the kelp

 

 

 

whittled down
to a toothpick
cheese block

 

 

 

spare change where the rainbow almost ends

 

 

 

day moon
drone hovers
over the observatory

—from Rattle #53, Fall 2016
Tribute to Adjuncts

__________

Aubrie Cox: “Creative writing is a luxury usually reserved for full-time faculty, so I spend a lot of time teaching composition and grading essays. There is no funding for adjuncts, so I have to pay my own way to readings and conferences. My mind is usually filled to the brim worrying about money and wondering if I’ll have a job the following semester. Since becoming an adjunct, I have longer rumination periods and write in spurts, whereas before I tended to write year-round. Usually in the spring I’ll suddenly have several really good poems, then it may not be until August when something else solidifies. That being said, when I don’t have the mindset to write, I find a way to champion someone else’s work. Just because I’m not in the act of writing doesn’t mean I stop being engaged.” (website)

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October 17, 2016

“What I Never Told My Draft Board” by John BradleyPosted by

John Bradley

WHAT I NEVER TOLD MY DRAFT BOARD

Our English class, as you know, is too large, one afternoon our teacher reports. Some of you will have to go. I feel the clutch in her throat. Vexed strands stuck to her naked neck. The principal, she adds, keeps pressing for names. I believe you should choose—after all, it is your class. I tear a piece of paper from my notebook, consider who belongs and who doesn’t. I write a name. Whose I can no longer say. The kid with the leaky mouth, ink-stained shirt? The bully who tossed a friend’s bike down a window well, blessed it with his piss? We’ve all recorded our selections; the tally begins. Susan Abbott goes first, surrendering her paper ballot. Then the teacher stands before Sandy Berman, on my right. His empty hand. I won’t write anyone’s name, he tells her. Why not? she asks. Because I don’t want to, he explains. I know that moment—he’s in for big trouble. Now she comes to me, and I oblige, handing her the folded slip. She studies the name. Then her eyes study mine, a little longer than proper. Before she moves on, she re-folds the paper, puts it back in my hand. A small wave, drawing close the eyeless fish, shoves it back to shore, before my feet. Why won’t she keep the name? Will she commit each one to memory? How many times it appears? Most likely we’ll all choose the same students, the few who don’t deserve to stay. She makes her way around the semi-circle, the thirty-eight of us, slowly absorbing the names of the chosen. When done, she retreats to her desk and leans against it. She inhales a soiled breath. The principal made no such demand. You disappoint me, she says. Damp strands stuck. To the vexed voice. Naked neck. Only one student. In the entire class. Only Sandy. Refused.

—from Rattle #53, Fall 2016
Tribute to Adjuncts

__________

John Bradley: “I’ve been an adjunct instructor at Northern Illinois University since 1992. As Illinois has no budget (our governor and state legislation cannot tolerate each other) and enrollment has been dropping, NIU has been laying off instructors. I teach mostly first-year composition courses.”

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October 14, 2016

“Rare Book and Reader” by Ned BalboPosted by

Ned Balbo

RARE BOOK AND READER

Helen D. Lockwood Library,
Vassar College, September 1977

Back in the days when we called freshmen freshmen,
I was one, a lank-haired Vassar co-ed
newly landed, searching for the reason
I was there. Before me, dead ahead,
the future held its promise like the shaded
vistas in brochures, or like an album
on the rack the moment you’ve decided
that you have to buy it, take it home—

and so I felt (caught in that no man’s land
of post-arrival limbo, nothing sure
except how much I didn’t understand
of privilege, wealth, and class), this much was clear:
the album’s title—Past, Present, and Future—
and the cloak of Marvel’s Doctor Strange
vanishing through some portal on the cover
promised an escape—at least a change.

The last track was inspired by Nostradamus,
Gallic seer and astrologer
who wrote The Prophecies, mysterious
quatrains of cryptic riddles that declare
foreknowledge of disaster, plague, and war,
offering hints that tease and tantalize
(through allegory, tangled metaphor)
the gullible who read with opened eyes—

Hister (Hitler?), three brothers (Kennedys?)
world wars (all three?)—well, sure, he could be wrong,
but if Al Stewart thought the prophecies
troubling enough to put them in a song,
what else would time confirm before too long?
I sat, the huge book open to a page
five hundred years old, in a foreign tongue
(French mostly), brought out carefully from storage

by a young librarian, or senior,
watchful and amused at my expense.
Who wouldn’t be? She knew I was no scholar
steeped in sixteenth-century charlatans,
but just some boy who’d wandered in by chance
or impulse, new to college, drifting still,
his mind enraptured by coincidence
proclaimed as proof, each generation’s will

to buy such bunk, as always, bottomless.
Now I’d beheld an ur-text, reassured
it did exist. A reader under glass,
I sat, sealed in the hush, but not one word—
archaic, clue-encoded—struck a chord:
I’d never studied French! And yet I’d seen
the priceless artifact kept under guard
in some dark vault climate-controlled within

the labyrinthine archives I envisioned;
briefly exposed to light and then returned
to deep oblivion, the world’s end
unknown and waiting. What else had I learned?
That where the distant future is concerned,
no language equal to it can exist
nor is there language clear and unadorned
to show how time recedes into the past

—or if there is, it’s written not for us
but for the eyes of one whose practiced gaze
sees farther than our own—who knows that loss
becomes the weight and measure of our days—
who, in the hidden turnings of a phrase,
detects a revelation cast in code
we almost grasp but which remains, always,
unbroken, like the mercy that we’re owed.

—from Rattle #53, Fall 2016
Tribute to Adjuncts

[download audio]

__________

Ned Balbo: “In 2014, I was dismissed from my position as an adjunct associate professor after 24 years at a mid-Atlantic Jesuit university. Administrative turnover and the Great Recession had led to policy changes that prohibited contract renewals for full-time adjuncts in my category, and I was only one of many who lost a place during this period. AAUP (the American Association of University Professors) intervened on my behalf, to no avail; so did many tenured colleagues who found their voices ignored when they spoke out to defend the full-time adjunct colleagues whom they valued. In the end, their efforts succeeded in reversing university policy, but not before most of the full-time adjuncts affected had already been dismissed. (In the two years since, a few have been rehired at reduced status.)” (website)

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