roll with the punches

One of my most influential teachers taught me to "roll with the punches," to react and adapt when things don't go as planned. I've been struggling for the past few years or so to stick to that lesson.

When it was 8th grade, and half the photographs for my PACE slideshow didn't develop, rolling with the punches was a breeze. I continued with my planned project, drawing the scenes that didn't work out on overhead film, which my teacher then shrunk to match the other slides in scale. I remember my show, Super Spatula, getting all the laughs it was supposed to despite the odd juxtaposition of slide image and drawn image.

When I embarked on my accidental academic career, I noticed a sharp decline in my rolling ability. And this year was the worst yet. I have been mulling over the contents of a weird faculty retreat that made me question my teaching habits and my role at this institution. During the retreat, we watched a video about the shift to 21st century ideas of education, and I couldn't help but feel powerless in the internet age.

What is the role of a lecturer in a world where everyone googles and cites Wikipedia as a reference?

Why does it matter, though? If people come to my class, that means they want more than Wikipedia, right? Wrong. Over and over again, I find indications that all students want from me is the bare minimum. They want to hear what they already know and think. They want to see what they've already seen. And they want to use Wikipedia or even blogspot as a serious academic reference.

I even questioned myself when I found an interesting link about cave art, which I teach at the beginning of the semester. But the link was for io9.com, a site I'm not familiar with and hesitant to put on my class website. It seems like part of my job is now to teach students how to filter the serious material from all the internet chaff, when they do not want that particular skill.

Add high schoolers to this mix, and it all ends in tears, literally. I cried because I felt so humiliated after the grand high school experiment exploded in my face. Suffice it to say that at the end of the day, some people just expect an A for being there, and if you aren't on board with that, they'll question your professionalism.

Not rolling at all now. Some might peg me as a digital media-loving millennial, but I really do feel like an analog dinosaur next to my students. I speak an entirely different language and cannot connect to them, no matter which sites I link to or which videos I play for them.

cool kids

I'm not sure what it means, that I feel most at ease when bantering back and forth with an older generation of academics in our little corner of the institution. And I do mean that...the adjunct work space is in a hidden-away corner of the institution. They aren't really my peers: several Baby-Boomers with grandchildren, mostly Gen X with kids in middle to high school. I'm one of the oddballs. I know there are more of us, but they don't seem to hang out in the corner.

And the weird thing is that I'm okay with that. I don't really want to be reminded of my own generation anymore. Neither those of us who are "making it," nor those of us who suffer from underemployment. I'm insanely jealous of the thirty-somethings with jobs, and hearing about unemployment makes me ill. It seems the more I read about possibly pursuing a PhD and making this academic thing more of a career than just paying the bills, the more I believe it is a terrible idea. And not in the Hollywood, bad-decisions-lead-to-happy-endings sort of way.

My generation seems to be lost. Or at least I am. Of the two "Xennials" writing in this bittersweet article in Good magazine, I side with the admitted "malcontent" born in 1983. I'm right there with you, pal.

But I don't want to hang out with you.

There has to be some name for it--if not, I could come up with one all my own--this compulsion to seek out people who are different, to be lost in the heterogeneous crowd. I always felt better walking around the city by myself. Having a friend along on roadtrips always made it more stressful. Conversing casually with strangers is infinitely easier than opening up to closer acquaintances.

My fear is that the strangers in the adjunct corner aren't strangers anymore. They ask me about Dad, and I share what's going on in my life outside work. I ask them about their wives and kids and travel plans. Horror of horrors! It's wrong, isn't it? Shouldn't I socialize with people who are in the same life stage as I am? What life stage is that, exactly? Chronically stuck. Circling the drain. Failed to launch.

I just had the thought that my musings about the adjunct corner do not qualify as cultural clash. Maybe I'm not so different from the other teachers, despite decades of life in between. That just makes my lack of those "signifiers of success" that much more painful. How did I get into a Gen X mindset without all the Gen X bells and whistles? Where is my mortgage? Where is my white picket fence? Shouldn't I have those before I am qualified to sigh heavily at the snotty Millennials that fill the hallways and roll through the campus stop signs?

The knowledge that many of my peers have over thirty years of secondary teaching experience or doctorates or families seems suspended long enough for me to derive actual pleasure from hanging out in the corner. There is the IT guy whose phone sounds like the Star Trek (TNG) comm, and the geology professor who yells at the nursing faculty for using the community Xerox machine. Granted, those nursing gals do tend to cause several paper jams.

There are the math professors--all former high school teachers--who tease me over my far too subjective discipline of choice. They tease everyone else, too, so it's no big deal. One has to keep his desk super clean because of an immune deficiency, but he makes it entertaining, writing "No Adjuncts Allowed" or piling furniture in front of the desk to prevent the next English professor from sitting down. The mock battle over territory is a welcome respite from fearing the dull stares of students in the next hour.

There is the political science professor that I could probably talk to for hours on end if we didn't have work to do. And she's Republican. That's how deep I'm in this. I get along with people who I would expect to look at my liberal self with conservative scorn. I'm the only art history nerd in the adjunct corner, yet I fit in.

This fitting in is a very strange sensation, mind you, considering my experiences as a student. Before I stood in front of a whiteboard to earn money, I was an outcast. Now, I imagine we are the cool kids of the faculty. Too cool for our own offices. We can't be bothered to hold regular office hours. Health insurance is so over. Our clique is not impenetrable...full-time staff and tenured faculty are welcome to stop by. I don't even mind seeing students in the grocery store anymore. This is naturally what happens when geeks and nerds become cool.

I'm way too comfortable with this. Where is the angst? Wait, I just remembered I'll never be able to retire. Oh, and my part-time socializing eclipses even my closest relationships that are in dire need of repair. There we go, angst recovered!

Elegy for a term paper tossed in the trash

You weren't that bad...worth a B-, for Pete's sake! Yet, it might be that one capital letter that the student glanced at before tossing you aside, as if to say "good enough, no need to improve." Not even a pat on the back for you, term paper, for being satisfactorily organized and formatted. Not a second wasted on how your argument might have been strengthened with well-chosen citations.

You were tossed in that trash can far too soon. You had a whole life ahead of you. A life of study and reflection on essay structure and grammar. A life worthy of academic praise.

I'm sorry, term paper, that your creator doesn't give a damn about you.

I suspect many term papers are thus abused and cast away. But what about the students, these creators-turned-destroyers? What is the motive, the thought process behind such a callous attitude toward the written word? And why do I care?

As I picked up a random person's large McDonald's pop to place in the trash, I noticed a term paper with familiar green comments written (rather politely and stylishly, if I may be so bold), in the margins. It was the term paper of one of my students who had finished an exam earlier that day and picked up his term paper on the way out. And, also on the way out, he deposited that paper in the trash. There is, say, a 20-foot walk between my table and the trash can, so I highly doubt the student absorbed any helpful tidbits between picking up and pitching.

To which I say, "Thank you. I'll lose no sleep over your bad grade tonight."

That trashed term paper is a symptom and symbol of the larger ills of academia and the Millennial generation (or at least how Millennials are viewed in society).

This student grew up in the same region I did. I don't know his family background, his social status, or any of that, and I shouldn't know. But I can tell he is at least ten years younger than I am, so he's a Millennial whereas I identify myself (defiantly!) as Generation Y. We are different, yet the same.

We are different, because no one taught him to value his work. Or at least to include writing in what he considered "work." That attitude is far too prevalent these days. Too many people (*cough*Business majors*cough*) think writing is not a worthwhile skill, not something to be practiced and perfected. Writing is simply the act of expressing your ideas, which I should think is useful in any profession. My parents might have stopped reading my writing around 10th grade, once it got more and more esoteric, but they never allowed me to think of it as worthless. Writing made it possible for me to succeed in college, then graduate school.

Further success is pending. And I suppose that's why I have difficulty finding fault only in the student. It's a tough world out there. Yet that's why parents foster a sense of pride in a job well done. Whatever that job may be. That's why teachers give stickers, smiley faces, and praise...at least, they used to before all the standardized testing. The apathy of our students is of our own making. And once they're apathetic, there doesn't seem to be a way of reversing the process. Not that I've found...

I end with this question: how can we expect Millennials to value earning their way through work, when we don't teach them to value what work they do in school?