Professional Development
The first scrawlings for this were made in a puke green notebook a student left in a classroom one day. My student? I hope not. The notebook was completely empty, except for a short phrase on the inside cover:
college is wack
Is it? If so, why?
College writing courses are important. Right? Especially the ubiquitously compulsory first-year writing. At most campuses it’s one of a handful of courses all students have to take or test out of, and schools try very hard to restrict one’s ability to do the latter.
According to the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s “Principles for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing,” “For the more than 25 million students enrolled in America’s colleges and universities, postsecondary writing instruction is critical for success in college and beyond. In their writing courses, students gain experience analyzing expectations for writing held by different audiences and practice meeting those expectations. This experience contributes significantly to the development of productive writing practices and habits of mind that are critical for success.”
Stirring words. Profoundly ethical and inspirational. But let me ask a quick question: who’s teaching these courses? In large part, grad students at the four-year level, and adjuncts at the two-year level. Issues arise. Grad students are new to the game, and often lack adequate preparation; often they’ll get two “teacher training” courses that are run more like theory classes in composition pedagogy than covering the nuts and bolts of running an actual class (I know mine were). Grad students, in addition to being undertrained and new, are preoccupied with their own course work, creating and defending their dissertation, studying for comps and/or a translation test(s), being broke, demonstrating excellence in their chosen specialty, preparing to enter the job market. Moreover, they kind of get turned loose after that first year. You can spot-check them, and in a good program set up ongoing mentorship – which I have done as a mentor at the University of Houston – but even then they’re kind of on their own.
At the two-year level, many (and in some places, most) classes are taught by adjuncts, part-time instructors who can only teach 1-3 classes for a school by law and, if they depend on a full-time income, will have to quilt together a living by working for multiple school districts or finding a job outside of their teaching. Typically an adjunct has an MA and occasionally a PhD in English (I argue in another post one way to get more diverse faculty is to broaden the acceptable degrees for teaching college writing). These degrees vary in terms of specialty; sometimes, it’s in literature, or creative writing, which offers little training for first year writing, especially if they didn’t teach while earning their degree – which happens a lot more than you might think. Sometimes, even people with degrees in composition & rhetoric, linguistics, or education do not have substantial training in developmental writing, adult learning, or working with ESL students, disadvantaged students, students with disabilities, grading equity, the language hegemony question, antiracist pedagogy, or critical race theory (I’d venture to say most teachers are lacking in several of these areas in terms of professional development). And these adjuncts also make little money, and a lot of the time this is not what they wanted to do for a career. Let’s be honest: that’s a reason a lot of teachers suck. They never wanted to do it in the first place. It’s important to be realistic about that, as well as their levels of preparation; to this latter point, a 2014 report from Seven Research Centers aptly named The Seven Centers Report concludes “Students of color are disproportionately concentrated in schools with underqualified and less experienced educators” and “the least capable teachers too often teach students that demand the most qualified teachers.”
When I started teaching as an adjunct, after taxes, I made about $3,500 a class. For contrast, most full-timers at Sierra College, which became my primary place of employment, were making six figures, probably close to three times the per-class amount I made, with better medical, dental, and retirement, priority scheduling, and a guarantee of future employment provided they made tenure and didn’t physically strike or sleep with any of their students (or spew out hate speech or show up drunk more than once). Meanwhile us broke-as-hell adjuncts were doing most of the teaching (oh and administrators were making almost twice as much as the full-time teachers, and none of this has changed).
Both two and four-year colleges offer de facto a two-tiered system, with full professors making most of the money, and part-time instructors (often) doing most of the teaching. According to an article that appeared in Inside Higher Ed titled “How First-Year Comp Can Save the World,” first-year writing courses at the four-year level are “generally staffed by the lowest-paid contingent faculty in the university” and “have become academic piecework factories, only instead of being paid by the blouse, faculty members are paid by the contact hour, with no compensation for time spent conferencing with students, reading and marking student writing, or preparing for class.”
These teachers have a lot to deal with besides money problems, degree requirements, secondary status in their programs, non-teaching obligations, and a lack of training. For example, according to NorCal educational collaborative KQED, “the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress writing test found almost 75 percent of eighth and 12th-graders in the U.S. wrote below grade level and only 3 percent of U.S. students, across all demographics, wrote at an ‘advanced’ level.” On top of that, more and more students are international, meaning an increase in ESL students (the pandemic has changed this, but probably not permanently), and the vast majority of teachers have no training in how to work with this population. These things are tangentially connected to the “Language Hegemony” argument. In other words, what does “advanced level” mean? Sounding white? Writing white? Is that fair? To what extent should that be an expectation? Who created the assessments? I think language standards should be more accessible if college is to decenter its legacy as something set up for the success of first-and-foremost affluent white people. I have a giant essay on this topic titled Language Hegemony. It is very difficult, I believe, to conceive of a path to academic attainment that exists independently of this standard. But we must recognize how much of one’s identity is bound up in language, the human costs of labeling a child’s language as deficient and not valued, the burdens of learning a new way of communicating, and how suffocatingly academia imposes what Asao Inoue called the “white racial habitus,” in other words white ways of being, as the norm, as what gets you up the academic ladder and success in the workforce.
Another major issue is students in low-income areas are more likely to be in schools with class sizes that are too large. This continues into higher education. In my area, first-year writing at the two-year level, large class sizes are the norm.
In their “Guidelines for Class Size and Workload for College and University Instructors of English: A Statement of Policy,” the Association of Departments of English, affiliated with the Modern Languages Association, writes the following:
“College English teachers should not teach more than three sections of composition per term. The number of students in each section should be fifteen or fewer, with no more than twenty students in any case. Class size should be no more than fifteen in developmental (remedial) courses. No English faculty member should teach more than sixty writing students a term; if students are developmental, the maximum should be forty-five.”
Very few teachers of any type teach classes this small, and a lot of teachers, if they’ve got a full-time schedule, are handling nearly double this recommendation. One semester I had 135 students in six classes. Who’s teaching according to the above ideal? Teachers at rich private schools – so you see here another reason the gap continues to grow between the haves and the have nots, at a time when academic attainment is more crucial than ever as a determinant of one’s outcomes in life.
How to manage it all? How to improve? How to not suck and thereby destroy the future of America? How to overcome the charge that you’re perpetuating white supremacy by modeling white practices in the classroom? Also, did you know only about 38% of people in America over 25 have a four year college degree, which is an all-time high, and that in 1965 which isn’t all that long ago only 12% of men and 7% of women even had four years of college (source)? College for all “or else you’re a lesser citizen” is a relatively new thing. And so many students have chaos in the home, unsupportive families, inadequate preparation, language barriers, a lack of guidance and mentoring, horrible K-12 pipelines, and meanwhile our society is telling everyone you must be academically successful, or get a scarlet F on your chest and have less options and prestige in life. The deck is stacked against so many people and it’s not fair. Honestly, to the students and the teachers both. On one side you have a struggling student, on the other academic success, and in the middle, the teacher, under pressure to get the student from one place to the other, and getting scolded for not doing better. Many of these teachers don’t have time to go to conferences, or engage in significant professional development activities on campus, because they’re too busy teaching and/or can’t afford to. Or they’re working toward their degree. Or waiting tables, or mixing up fancy coffee drinks. Inevitably, they will buy books on how to teach, or read articles, as part of their professional development. And most of these SUCK SUCK SUUUUCK. You get an archiving of a serious intellectual consideration of the discipline, not a text that’s meant to travel and be accessible to teachers looking for what to do in their classrooms. Or professors of education who make field visits to poor and at-risk campuses then return to their universities with their reports on what people need to do based on observations, interviews, and studies they’ve read. In so many of these texts the reader/struggling teacher walks away with very little about how to run classes, deal with problem students (or problem faculty or administration), and manage their department responsibilities; furthermore, they get few activities, prompts, projects, guidelines, examples of student work, or any real guidance on what, realistically, a teacher goes through, especially a new one.
What to do? I think a teacher should aggregate best practices, materials, insight, advice. A teacher must always get as much of it as possible at their disposal. Education in my humble opinion should not be about telling each other what the right strategies are, but instead sharing our insight and materials and admitting all our perspectives are limited by the nature of the teaching that we do.
Over fifteen years I’ve been accumulating the things I mention above. My website is in essence a crapload of activities and advice for what a struggling teacher can do to improve, run classes, stay afloat, and perhaps flourish. Not always, though, I’m not gonna lie. I’ve been in brutal classroom environments. And I know what it’s like to have other teachers, or mentors, or super-smart people who write books and articles on composition, and teaching, make you think you are not a good teacher because you’re having problems prepping a course or grading, or getting students to listen, or participate, or improve; that because your classes are not nonstop carnivals of pedagogical awesomeness or because you can’t decipher or actualize what the theorists publishing books and essays have to say, you’re not good. It’s not true. If you want to be a good teacher, you’re a good teacher. You just need access to good materials and practices, and time to develop. And to be nice. A lot of students need to feel like they have an ally, are worried they don’t belong, stumble along the way, and need a hyper-individualized plan from supportive faculty to take root and grow in places where there are more rocks than soil.