Two days of hard rain in Flagstaff sent me running out of the forest back into town. No way am I getting stuck in this thick red mud. I drive a soccer mom minivan, not a 4-wheel drive monster truck. On the second night, I found a place to park with a dozen other nomadic vehicle dwellers. Better than Cracker Barrel. Although I'm grateful for Cracker Barrel, don't get me wrong. They welcome travelers. I parked there the first night. I don't mind the sounds of trains and traffic. I lived on a busy bus line in Portland for 18 years. Every fifteen minutes it sounded as if the bus was going to come right through my bedroom window. Eddie and I got used to it. Sometimes the silence in the forest is unsettling (see previous post).
So now I'm taking an SNRI to fix the chemicals in my brain. I'm not expecting much, but I won't know for six weeks or so whether it will calm the angry part of my brain that yells everytime the air pressure changes. I have to live through the side effects first. Like eating your meat before you get the pudding.
You may have received the impression that just because I'm currently a nomad I'm not working. I probably mentioned some time back that I was a contract editor for a for-profit college based in the Midwest. After two years, they eliminated the editor position, but offered the terminated editors the opportunity to apply to be . . . I guess you would call us part-time contingent adjunct faculty. I'm not teaching courses, thank God. Don't want to do that again. Now I'm a Chair for two students and a Committee Member for four others.
Everything happens remotely, just like the online university I attended. This college has distilled the dissertation production experience to a set of checklists, rubrics, templates, and approval hoops. It seems as if it should be well organized, and it could be, if humans didn't keep getting in the way. All the snafus I've seen have been because administrators and other part-time faculty don't follow rules, or there are no consistent rules to follow.
What drives me nuts is the way the administrators express sanguine appreciation for faculty (and I use the term "faculty" very loosely). We are so grateful for all you do for our candidates, or variations on that theme, ad nauseum, until after a while, you get the feeling you aren't really appreciated at all. Of course, all you have to do is look at the pay structure to know the only way this college can keep its tuition so low is by paying its adjuncts a pittance. It's an old page out of an old playbook.
I'm not mad. I like helping students work through the process of earning their degrees. I'm not mentoring for SCORE anymore, but this is not much different, just mentoring in a different arena.
I'm not really an academic. I am reminded of that fact every time I see how other Chairs interact with their students. Where they are terse, formal, sometimes snippy, and authoritarian, I try to be collaborative, encouraging, and approachable. Maybe I'm too informal. I treat students like people who are just a few steps behind me on the academic path.
I remember my experience with my Chair. She was smart, but impatient and condescending. I am guessing she was Chair to many students. No wonder she was cranky all the time. I had to post weekly updates. Usually it was all bull pucky. I know what students do. They muddle around for nine weeks and pull something out of their butts in week ten and expect their Chair to grade it and return it before the end of the term.
No use being angry when humans reveal their humanness.
I'm back in the forest, sitting in my car. The sun is hot, the air in here is too warm, and then a breeze blows through, and it feels great.
Taking it all a day at a time.
