Goodbye Academia Part 3: The Work (Teaching)

In my last post about academia, I noted that the absurdity of the job market is one of the things that had deterred me from entering the profession. Another thing was the work itself. 

There are a couple of big things professors do: teach, and publish research. Obviously there are a lot of other, somewhat smaller things they do, but those are the biggies. In this post I'll talk about the teaching, and in the next post I'll tackle publishing and other aspects of the profession.

To begin, I should say that I love teaching. It's like putting on a performance. I love the kind of confident, self-deprecating humor that fits so well in the humanities classroom. I love when students run with a topic and actually seem engaged. Much of the time I also enjoy conferencing with students, particularly when we don't have to focus on specific assignments, but rather talk more abstractly about ideas.

Overall, I think I could be very happy being a teacher of English, film, and other humanities related topics. On the other hand, there are some terrible aspects of the job.

Like grading. I truly despise grading. I hate it because it's un-enjoyable, and I hate it because I don't like the idea of grades in the first place. My ideal university wouldn't concern itself with quantifiable measures of success like grades; rather people would learn what they want and be tested by how they apply their skills, debate their ideas, and critique their environment. 

Obviously that's overly utopian and simplistic (especially today, when education increasingly values "results" as opposed to learning), but that doesn't change the fact that hate to grade papers. Usually when I get papers I weigh the value of throwing them all away and telling my students they were incinerated in terrible car wreck on my way home (which I miraculously survived). I've never resorted to that, but the point is that grading is a big deterrent to becoming a teacher. 

More broadly, however, I've also been surprised at how different a student-teacher relationship looks from the latter position. As a student, I've always enjoyed debating and coming to new conclusions. In many ways, that was the only way I could learn. However, I didn't realize that the vast majority of student ideas are old news to teachers. (I think I understood this vaguely, but I didn't realize how quickly it got monotonous). 

When I was teaching English 150, for example, I'd read the textbook many, many times by my final semester. That meant that students reading it for the first time were going to have a hard time thinking of or saying something that I hadn't either heard or thought of first. Or that was even very interesting. 

That's not to say that it didn't happen, it just didn't happen that often. And, I don't think that's a reflection on my students. I had just been thinking about the topics for so much longer, and talked to so many more people about them, that it was rare for something new to come up in class or student-teacher conferences. 

I remember one time a student did come in to a conference with some amazing ideas. It was invigorating and we talked passionately and at length about those ideas. When the conference ended I was simultaneously exhilarated, but also wondered if I had crossed the line of what was appropriate; I had simply been sharing and debating opinions as a person, without objectivity and or any attention to how it helped the student with any particular task (I also momentarily ceased to be concerned with towing any particular party line—which was always a struggle at BYU—and was just honest about what I thought about things). 

The point is that my teachers have frequently opened my eyes to new ideas, but my students rarely have. Maybe that's my problem, I don't know. But that's the way things have gone. (My students at SLCC frequently amaze me, but that has more to do with their life stories and has little connection to what I'm actually supposed to be teaching them.) 

There are also other things about teaching that I don't want to do. For example, I dislike teaching writing and composition. I would actually have emphasized in rhetoric as a master's student at BYU, except that that option's most obvious career trajectory led to teaching writing classes. For me, the prospect of a life spent teaching First-year Writing or (worse) Advanced Writing was ineffably depressing. Many of my good friends have chosen that path and love it, but for some reason, I just don't.

So all in all, there are aspects of teaching that I like, and that I don't like. Like the job market, this fact led me only to apply to a few really good schools, because I felt that that decision would lead to a career in which I had more control over which classes I taught, how I taught them, and how often. On the other hand, if I was going to have to teach too many classes (and thus have more grading), or classes I dislike and/or fundamentally disagree with (like composition courses), I wasn't interested.

Teaching at SLCC

I've mentioned a few times in previous posts that I'm currently working at the Daily Herald in Provo. However, that is only a part time gig. In addition, I'm also teaching at Salt Lake Community College. I teach two sections of advanced writing. In many ways, the job is a pain. I have to get up early, commute 40 minutes there and 40 minutes back, my class sizes are relatively big, and the pay is terrible.

However, despite all those negative aspects of the job, it's really kind of cool. Also, because I was previously teaching at BYU, I can't help but compare the two teaching environments. BYU pays much better (even though I was a graduate instructor I made roughly twice as much), has smaller classes, and better facilities.

Yet, in many ways, teaching at SLCC is a better experience. The students, for example, are at least as engaged as BYU students. In fact, many of them are more engaged. They make a lot of comments, and have insightful things to say. There is also a lounge for instructors that has complementary hot chocolate. I don't have a cubicle (as I sort of did at BYU), but I do have most of the resources I need to teach.

The other big thing that makes teaching at SLCC interesting is the diversity. It's no secert that BYU is a pretty homogenous place, but I think that a lot of people at BYU kid themselves into thinking that it has some substantial diversity too. (I know I did this.) Sure, there are a handful of international students, and a slight variation in economic class.

Yet, at SLCC probably a third of my students can barely speak English. Virtually all of them have jobs, and they practice a variety of different religions, political ideologies, and value systems.

Diversity, by itself, may not be inherently good (though I tend to think it is), but the advantage it offers is that class discussion is more lively, nuanced, and probing than it tended to be at BYU. No one can simply take values for granted. If someone starts assuming something about everyone else (like, for example, that everyone agrees politically or religiously), there are a bunch of people to immediately call that person on it. This rarely happened in my courses at BYU and those students who were different (who were, say, moderate democrates) tended to either get shut down by other students or danced around their actual beliefs in an effort to avoid alienating people. (That didn't always happen, but my point is that in this regard BYU pales in comparison to SLCC.)

There are a few reasons this matters. First, I think it'd be useful for BYU to attempt to diversify itself. If the point college courses is to encourage critical thinking (which it was in the courses I taught), diversity is one of the best and easiest ways to accomplish that.

Second and more broadly, however, I think that people (especially university-educated people, including myself) should avoid knocking community colleges. Personally, I can't remember a time in my life where my sphere of university-bound kids or university alumni didn't look down on community college.

As I've been teaching at SLCC however, I've come to see this as not-so-thinly veiled class politics. It's a way to look down on certain people, and a way to believe that one group is "better" than another. Of course, few people would actually admit to these attitudes and perhaps few even personally hold them. But the over arching meta-narrative in the university world is that community college is filled with the incapable, the unmotivated, and the unpromising.

My experience thus far at SLCC suggests otherwise.