He exits, stage right, leaving wads of hair wafting all over the keyboard. Little mementos to encourage me to draw on his wisdom while I struggle to remember my dissertation topic. Funny, once the concept paper was off my plate, I apparently jettisoned the mountains of information I had piled up in my brain, sort of like flipping the switch on the garbage disposal. Whooosh. All gone. Now I need that knowledge back, but it's been hauled off to the city dump. Figuratively speaking.
I can hardly bear to read the wretched tome now, after exorcising it so thoroughly from my brain. All I see are typos and grammar errors, cliches and redundancies. Reading it is torture. Argh, it's the Abu Ghraib of literature reviews! Who wrote this crap? It sounds like it was written by a fat lazy cat with nothing better to do than wax maudlin about the lack of academic quality in for-profit career colleges. Oh, wait. Huh?
Well, never mind. Tonight, after a day of mixed rain and snow, the temperature is dropping, and I can look forward to sliding to work in the morning. That should be entertaining, if it doesn't end in tears, which driving on ice usually does. Maybe I'll get lucky. Maybe there will be a two-hour late start. We'll have to cram six hours of class time into four, else we'll have to make up time on yet another Friday. But hey, we'll get it done. Move 'em in and move 'em out, that's our motto. The show must go on. Never let it be said we didn't teach! Of course, the relationship between teaching and learning at our institution is tenuous at best. But what do you expect from for-profit higher education? I figure it's a good day when management leaves us alone and no one is trying to kill us.
I remember the days when I was uninformed about the pecking order of higher education. I thought teaching at a college was a prestigious honor. I was loyal and committed to my college, willing to put my money where my mouth was, ready to embark upon this doctoral journey. I naively thought that earning this degree would earn me the college's commitment and loyalty in return. Ah ha ha. I also used to think we cared about quality... the quality of our teaching, the quality of our course materials, the quality of our customer service efforts. I cared, some other teachers cared, but guess who didn't care? Yep. Management.
Tonight I'm at home, but a few stalwart teachers are teaching a few stubbornly committed students while the roads turn black with ice. Apparently no one in authority is there to make the decision to cancel class for the remainder of the evening so folks can try to get home before the ice gets really bad. Absentee management. I wouldn't be surprised if I went up to the third floor corporate offices and found nothing but cobwebs. Who is steering this sinking ship? Could be we are rudderless, adrift. Could be management sneaked off in the lifeboats with all the loot while we were busy bailing the hold.
