The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist

Landing a Teaching Position

201 Landing a Teaching Position . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Despite my warning that there are very few teaching jobs out there for freshly minted creative writers, most will still pursue this elusive beast.Therefore, I have dedicated the next several chapters to the profession. The World of Adjuncting Though I have held only one tenure-​ track teaching position thus far—I’m now tenured—I’ve taught at a total of nine colleges and universities in a variety of positions: visiting assistant professor, visiting writer, adjunct lecturer, teaching assistant, and so on. Since the adjunct position is the one you’re most likely to get if you haven’t published a book, allow me to walk you through this murky jungle of exploitation. As defined by Merriam-​ Webster, an adjunct is “something joined oradded to another thing but not essentiallya part of it.” Some colleges—community colleges, in particular—piece together the majority of their faculty out of adjuncts. Adjuncts are cheap and dispensable. Best of all for the community college, there is an endless supply of PhDs and MFAs ready to replace an adjunct who leaves. There’s a community college here where I live in Winston-​ Salem, North Carolina, that was paying $1,000 per class back in 2002, when I first moved here. (I can’t imagine they’re paying better these days.) A friend of mine agreed to teach six classes there one semester. The classes offered at these schools usually have outlandish enrollment caps. A beginning composition course, which shouldn’t have more than twenty students, is often capped at thirty.These jobs don’t offer any health or retirement benefits, and there’s usually no guarantee of work beyond the semester you’re teaching. Sometimes, they even make you pay for a parking sticker. My friend wisely quit after a few weeks, once he realized that the work-​ load was unreasonable. (Normally, I would advise against quitting a teaching position once the semester has begun, but since this particular school didn’t mind taking full advantage of its faculty, why should the exploited teacher care about the difficult spot he’s put them in?) So, let’s review this. If my friend had taught there for the entire year, he’d have raked in a whopping $12,000 and had no timewhatso- 202 Employment for Writers ever to write because of the course-​ load and class sizes. Each semester , he’d have had one hundred and eighty students; if he assigned each class to write four five-​ page essays, he’d have been grading three thousand and six hundred pages each semester or seven thousand and two hundred for the year. Oh, wait, but he’d have gotten his summers off, right? Not if you’re making 12K a year, you wouldn’t. Whenever I took on adjunct work, I always had to find a full-​time job in the summer to make ends meet. Hell, I sometimes had to find a nighttime job during the semester to make ends meet. In fact, one year, while working as an adjunct at a community college in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I took a nighttime job scoring standardized tests along with whatever weekend work the local temp agency found for me. To supplement that income, I sold plasma. I wish I was kidding, but I’m not. Why would anyone in their right mind put themselves through this? Good question. Many people do it for the experience. What better way to get hands-​ on teaching than to pick up some classes at the local community college? Most likely you’ll be teaching introduction to composition , but it’s possible you’ll get thrown a literature course along with some writing center duties. Some do it so as not to have a gap in their teaching experience. They see it as a temporary situation before landing that tenure-​ track job.The risk is that you may never land that tenure-​ track job because you never have time to finish the book you’re working on. Some people do it thinking that it will eventually lead to a permanent position.These are people who still believe that the world is fair and that good students will eventually get rewarded. I took one adjunct job for this reason. I was led to believe that my position might become permanent. In November of my first semester, however, all of the adjuncts were told that therewas nowork for them the following semester, even though many of...