The envelope arrives from the school where you seem to remember you've signed up to teach somebody something, in some far-off time called "the fall." You stare quizzically at the envelope, and then you open it. Inside is a big fat packet called WELCOME BACK TO ALL FACULTY! that includes a schedule of two solid days of nonstop back-to-back seminars (starting tomorrow) in various aspects of how the school (ostensibly) runs, how to teach in it, who everybody is, where their offices are, blahblahblahblah.
If I could reclaim every hour I've wasted being dutiful at these orientations over the past 25 years, I would be a much younger, happier woman, and possibly a better teacher because I would not have started every fall term with my teeth clenched. Some of the preliminaries can be kinda fun--sometimes, if you're at a rich school, the food's good. Some of the people are funny. A girl like me can make a pal or two (and a passel of enemies if she's not careful). I cemented a lasting friendship with now-famous fiction and film writer Tom Perrotta as he and I dragged folding chairs across a steaming lawn somewhere in the wilds of Massachusetts late one August afternoon. Apropos the endless bullshit pedagogical "discussion" (read: lecture) we had just endured, he grumbled, "I just don't find this stuff endlessly fucking fascinating, know what I mean, Doc?" I barely knew Tom at that point, but I knew exactly what he meant; he endeared himself to me forever with that one wry remark.
Likewise a woman I sat across from at a seminar table while the then-director of the program rambled on and on about how much fun he'd had in New Orleans the weekend before and how hungover he still was. This woman across from me managed to give the impression of rolling her eyes without actually moving them. I was nearly in stitches. Ran into her in the bathroom later and announced, "I don't know who you are, but if you don't stop doing that thing with your face, we're going to be in trouble!" thereby making another great friend.
Now, though, the good news here, at the end of this particular summer, is that unlike every place I've ever taught, this public community college doesn't frogmarch its whole faculty through the welcome-back phase, thereby infantilizing and infuriating them. Instead, it offers about 30 different seminars, requires that we attend at least six hours, for which six hours we are paid (never happened to me before), and lets us pick what we want to attend. So I will go to a reception for new adjuncts (even though I've been teaching there since January, I came skidding in right at the beginning of last spring term, didn't even know where the bathrooms were), a session on building instructional websites (I've always meant to learn), something called Positive Attendance (required), and some free feeds of the meet-and-greet variety. I will not be attending What To Do When Your Projector Doesn't Light Up although I probably should. I refuse to PowerPoint my students. I'd rather give them lobotomies.
So the Summer I Thought Would Never End is about to. In many ways, it was the worst ever. But I got a lot of reading done, and it was productive in other ways. Overall, I'm grateful and hopeful. Now let's just hope nothing happens in these seminars to fuck that up!
I'm sorry about the worstness, and glad about the hopefulness! May the orientations be not too terribly disorienting, this year.
Posted by: dale | August 24, 2005 at 04:42 PM