WHAT IS GOOD ABOUT BEING AN ADJUNCT

For twenty years before I came to John Jay I was a foot messenger for Maple Vail Book Manufacturing Co. I did it mostly part time but got paid holidays and vacations. By the time I left I had four weeks vacation. Every Christmas the company took everybody to a nice restaurant for a good meal. As the years wore on I would be taken out on the anniversary of my starting the job. I continued doing the messenger job for some years after I got the adjunct position at John Jay. My only real complaint about the adjunct position is that management, unlike at the book manufacturing company has never once acknowledged my now almost 20 years of service to the college.

I like very much the coming in and teaching the two sections of 201 and I also teach a section of 101 at BMCC. After a year at JJC I had health insurance (while a messenger I had that through PEN). Over the years I have also taught creative writing in the undergraduate college at NYU and at Rutgers. When I had those extra courses teaching became much harder. There are the simple restraints of time. Creative writing is of course much easier to teach but there is still the simple facts of reading and attention that is demanded.

I value the freshman comp classes as being socially useful. Years ago Lore Segal told me that in spite of her own teaching solely creative writing...

I simply do not know how anyone could find the strength or energy, to teach five courses of Freshman comp plus be an active committee person, plus attend courses in pedagogy--- all under the shadow of not really being valued for one's intellectual, academic or literary accomplishments.

I think of the sheer number of papers that would have to be read...

This semester at BMCC I have 30 students in the 101 class and will read 14 essays from each of them. At JJC I have two sections of 201 with a combined enrollment of 50 students and I will read 12 essays from each of those students... I mention these numbers not to complain but to explain my belief that the central fact of these courses is actually reading and writing both of which take a great deal of time.


By teaching at the two colleges I see the incredible variety of students, have a certain lightness of being in these institutions and since I believe the students are the center of the college I am able to focus on the teaching of those students.

Granted one does not do anything other than teach and see students while at these colleges but that is more a problem in terms of the union agreements that define what and what not an adjunct can do.

At both institutions there are many longtime adjuncts who bring years of actual experience to their teaching and that fact is actually lost in much of this discussion and is symbolized by the inability of management to recognize them for reasons that have never really been very clear to me.