Teaching as a Day Job

Not long ago I remarked my suspicion that one of the factors that has kept English departments supplied with low-cost adjunct labor has been the number of holders of advanced degrees in English whose real goal is to write literature someday, not teach it--and teach English as other would-be writers wait tables to make a living, as a "day job."*

It is understandable that many should take that course in their lives--the hope at least existing of making some money while enjoying some control over their time. Still, it is a far from ideal arrangement, in ways that go even beyond the unattractions of teaching on an adjunct basis. The fact that as adjuncts they are likely to draw the least attractively scheduled courses--the early morning courses, the late courses--and may find themselves forced to spend many hours shuttling among multiple, widely dispersed, campuses to string together enough payments for enough courses to cover the bills permitting even the most meager existence--will diminish the actual control over their working time that they hoped for.

One can add to this that introversion is far from unknown among writers, and the front of a classroom is not a comfortable place for an introvert--especially the kind of classes that they are likely to draw, full of first-year students uninterested in the subject, who have that much less willingness or ability to hold up their end of a class discussion, who will constantly subject their instructors to difficult situations as they press them for a better grade, or even attempt to brazen their way through the course.

There is also the subject matter of their course itself--with its associated duties. Spending all day promulgating "one size fits all" rules to practitioners of an activity where One Size Never Fits All ("Never use passive voice!") and nit-picking other people's writing (as they grade paper after paper), seems all too likely to stifle rather than nurture a writer's creativity.

Alas, problematic as it all is, so are all the other choices available to writers constrained to work a Day Job.

* I would like to be clear here that this does not make them bad teachers any more than being aspiring writers makes those who wait tables bad waiters.