First Person

Why I Quit Adjunct Teaching

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By Matt Hall

"... And the woman, she waits in your closet," he said, leaning in closer, eyes wide. "And when you're not even thinking about it, she jumps out! And she injects you, and it gets all over your skin." At this, he, a student in my developmental-writing class, started rubbing his arms. I told him thanks for the heads-up on this curious and new household menace, but what I really wanted to know is if he could control his ---- "Outbursts?!" he shouted. "Oh sure, no problem."

The student -- let's call him King -- and I were having a post-class talk after he mumbled then yelled some non sequiturs during a quiz, then switched seats, brandishing his umbrella as if to brain me or a classmate. After this discussion, as I walked down the hall toward my department chairman's office to document it, I wondered, "Am I really cut out to be an adjunct?"

I became a college writing instructor by default. I'd gone through a graduate creative-writing program with a teaching assistanceship; meaning, I had taught two sections of basic freshman English each semester. When I graduated with my master's and my unpublishable first novel -- a novel so lengthy I believe it killed a prominent New York literary agent -- the skills I could offer America's marketplace seemed limited to busing tables and teaching how-to courses in writing.

At first, I fought the inevitable. I managed to persuade bookstore managers to hire me and became the last link in the publishing chain -- the guy who asks the reader, "Would you like your receipt in the bag?" Yet as I moved from the West to the East, the Northwest, and now finally to the Southwest, always, always -- like a curse, a horrible monstrous habit I couldn't shake, like sneak-reading People magazine -- teaching English would come, lulling me back to the fold.

So I'd apply to various colleges wherever I'd landed and teach a 101 or developmental or 102. But no matter where I taught, I found the same problems. Even in Seattle, where community colleges paid a whopping $3,000 a class, where the American Federation of Teachers has formed strong unions, even in Seattle, I felt horribly exploited.

It's no big news that across the board, academic institutions survive in part because of underpaid part-time teachers with few if any benefits. But administrators counter, "You can take a course for free. Now if that's not a benefit, I don't know the meaning of the word." And apparently these administrators don't.

One short interaction with such an administrator prompted me to get out of teaching for good. Near the parking lot one day, I introduced myself to the president of our community college. "My name's Matt Hall," I said. "I teach English here part time." Our president looked at me and said, "Thanks for helping out."

Helping out? I watched as he got into his brand-new Lexus and drove away. Two-thirds of the classes at that community college are taught by part-time teachers. So then we are what to this man? Volunteers? Drones who help him make car payments?

Around this same time, I got a call from an old friend who remembered my cartoons from 10 years earlier and asked if I'd draw up a few one-frames for The Chronicle based on my teaching experience. I thought, why not? I sent in a batch, sold a good number, and found I'd made half of what I made teaching an entire semester's class. I saw my exit and ran like hell.

As a freelance cartoonist, my finances are surely unpredictable, and there's no certain future of success, but I'm not going back. I don't need to. I've got a long memory. My cartoons come from my experiences: student papers about taking chainsaws to teachers, endless stacks of illiterate essays, admini-monsters, and unexpected dialogues with custodians.

While I often find myself flogging the students in my cartoons, the truth is that the best experiences, the greatest rewards, of my previous academic life came from working with students. Like the time I helped a woman learn how to read. "When I go over an essay," she explained, "I understand every word, but then as soon as I put the essay down, I can't remember anything." She'd been to a slew of reading/writing/learning specialists, without any success.

So one afternoon, we sat down and went word by word, sentence by sentence, through Annie Dillard's Flying. I found she didn't form pictures in her head when reading, didn't imagine in her mind what a group of words represented, and that was the key to her problem. I suggested making the text into images. At the end of two or so hours, she'd read the essay and remembered it. A tiny miracle. I felt good for her and for me, amazingly good, in that way that material rewards can never touch.

I cared deeply about my students. I wanted them to do well, to enjoy their writing processes, to become the people they wanted to become, using words as tools, as allies. But in the end, I don't think I was cut out for being an adjunct. In the end, I don't think I had what it takes. Some people do.

On the last day of my last developmental-English class -- the one with King, a man who said he could smash demons with his bare hands -- he came up to me, and said thanks. "You know," King said, leaning on my desk, "you've inspired me to become a teacher."

I wished him well and good luck, then thought -- still think -- if you want to be an adjunct, an adjunct who wishes to change the corruption inherent in higher education, you'll need to be like King, to believe in your power to smash demons with your bare hands.