I suppose I'm okay. I mean, I guess. The past two nights I've still been sleeping strange hours -- last night I slept from 1PM or so to 11PM, and then went back to sleep between 2 and 6AM (still, of course, feeling sick and not wanting to go anywhere/do anything once I got up), and this afternoon I went back to bed after coming home from teaching, sleeping about seven hours or so then. By all rights, I am fully rested and should feel that way. So why don't I? I used to sleep four to six hours per night, period, when I was in grad school...with no issues whatsoever. What's changed over the course of the past four months to where I somehow can't do that anymore?
Again, maybe I am actually getting sick with something. It was about this time last year, maybe a little later, that I got my month-long sinus infection that spread to my ears, throat, and chest, and would not go away no matter what I did until I took powerful antibiotics for it. I've mentioned before that by around the beginning of October in the fall (or, conversely, the end of February or so in the spring semester), I will get sick. I can almost set my watch to it and plan for it. By those times, I'm worn down enough by the semester to where my immune system has done all the fighting it can do for a while, it goes on strike, and I get sick. I don't know if that's what's going on this time around or if it's just an inability to get any sort of restful sleep. I'm no more stressed than I normally am; in fact, without any work of my own to do in addition to teaching my classes, I'm even a bit less stressed. At least compared to this same time of year when I was in grad school, anyway. Again, as I mentioned before, the weather isn't helping much. On Monday it was cool and misty/rainy, and that remained the same yesterday morning before the weather patterns all of a sudden changed gears yesterday afternoon and today -- it was 68 when I left the house to teach this morning at 7AM. By 12:30 when I got home, it was over 90 with a cloudless sky, humid and windy. Tomorrow it's supposed to be pretty and nice in the morning, and then we're supposed to get severe thunderstorms all afternoon and night.
This is what happens when Kansas attempts to transition between the seasons -- violent storms for a week or two, and then (magically) it's the new season. As mentioned before, Kansas doesn't really have a spring or fall -- it's more of a "summer for five months, stormy week or two, winter for five months, stormy week or two, repeat." Note that this is only a ten-month cycle, so this is why we occasionally get snow in fucking May before finals week. Or, at other times, in September or early October. All of this stuff has occurred since I've been living here. It's either going to snow or sleet with possible 40-degree days of soaking miserable rain for the entirety of October, or it's going to be 90 degrees every day again. There is no middle ground.
I've already told my students -- especially my West campus students, as after October 10, I'll be stuck over there for 12-hour days twice a week -- that if the weather gets terrible, their classes will be canceled, and I will let them know ASAP if/when it happens. My car is too old, I am far too lazy, and I am paid far too little to drive 30 miles (mostly on back roads which will be the last ones to be treated) through snow and ice to cover a reading assignment that they can do on their own with a little guidance from me via email and Blackboard. I will be repeating this announcement to my business writing students as well once that class starts, as by the time it starts at 7PM two nights a week, it will already be dark and nasty on those back roads without streetlights anyhow, especially when the weather is bad.
I have made out my lesson plans for my 011 students for the rest of the semester. Well, at least the unit timelines, anyway. There are five papers in that class, and after this first one comes in a week from today, they're basically turning in one after another after another every two weeks or so. This means that after this weekend I'm really never going to have a "free weekend" where I can do whatever I want after I finish minimal lesson planning and the like...ever again, not until around Christmas. The paper schedule for my 101 class is unfortunately staggered against the 011s, not to mention whatever schedule I'll have set up for my 210s. If I'm not grading a set of 011 papers, I'll be working on workshop copies or grading final copies of my 101 papers, in addition to grading papers every week for that accelerated 210 course. There are eight assignments for the 210 course. There are eight weeks I'll be teaching the class. Coincidence? I'll have at least one, if not two, sets of papers that I'll be grading over the course of Thanksgiving week, even -- which, coincidentally (again?) is the week before the last week of classes because of how the semester is set up this year.
I'll just say that I'm glad Daisy is coming down the week before all of that starts up.
I'll also say that I am very glad I'm finally getting paid again on a regular basis, as it somewhat lessens the pain.
This afternoon, I posted this article on my Facebook, as several other fellow instructors/professors had posted it. It's about an 83-year-old adjunct professor at Duquesne University who had taught for 25 years and had been slowly stripped of her teaching duties due to her age being an issue for "teaching effectiveness" despite glowing student evaluations, and was finally dismissed completely by the university with no benefits, severance pay, or health insurance -- because she was only an adjunct, she got none of that, even when the university president was making $700k a year. Even after being a professor for 25 years, she was unable to support herself. Once the university decided to cut her, she was on her own. Her health declined and she had a heart attack and died shortly thereafter.
It's supposed to be a tragic story about the fate of the adjunct professor and about the state of most universities' adjunct professor systems and why they need unions -- and indeed, it is that -- but what caught my eye the most in the story was this:
Re-read that if you didn't catch it the first time, because I certainly did. A salary of between $3,000 and just over $3,500 per three-credit course.
Maybe that makes me shallow. Maybe that makes me uncaring, or unable to see the bigger picture here, but that jumped out at me when I read it. That's a lot more than I'm making this semester teaching three different three-credit courses. 50 to 75% more than I'm making, to be exact. And this woman was 83 years old and living on that. She couldn't even pay her electric bill and was sleeping in her office because she couldn't pay for the upkeep on the house she owned. What's worse? She had cancer, and had thousands in medical bills from treatments that did little more than simply keep her alive. In the end, that didn't even help.
The university system is a mess, and while I am indeed very happy and consider myself very fortunate to have a teaching job at all this fall, the pay difference between adjuncts and even simple lecturers -- leaving the tenure-track associate and assistant professor people completely out of the equation -- is nothing short of criminal. Adjuncts scrape by -- they do it because they have to, and colleges and universities know that and capitalize on it. One of our former GTAs who graduated two years ago (and was adjuncting for us up until recently), finally got a job at a local community college where they began paying her an actual, somewhat live-able salary...at the cost of her agreeing to teach seven different classes this semester alone. If that community college has a 25-person cap on each class and each class is full, that's 175 students. If those classes each have four papers per semester on average (as my 101 classes do, for example's sake) that's 700 papers to grade over the course of sixteen weeks. Simply to be able to make...what, $10k more a year? $15k more?
Is it worth it?
I'd rather shoot myself than do that for anything less than $100-150k a year. And I'd damn well better have full health, eye, and dental coverage as well. Right now, I have thirty students, and am still having trouble remembering some of their names occasionally, a full month into the semester. In three weeks, I'll get twenty more students. I don't know how I would deal with 175 students. It's not even realistically comparable, and yet, there it is.
I just don't want to be over eighty with cancer and unable to retire because, in my career, there's no such thing as "retirement." I don't want to live into old age having never made more than $20k a year, having never owned a new car or actual health/life/etc insurance or owned a home.
It's all too fucking depressing.
I have to go shopping tonight while I'm awake; I can no longer avoid it. I am out (or nearly out) of the three C's -- coffee, cat litter, and cigarettes. As two of those are the only things that keep me somewhat sane every day, and the third stops the house from constantly smelling of cat excrement, I have no choice. I'm awake, quite possibly until I return home again from teaching tomorrow, and have little else to do in the overnight hours but shower and take care of chores. Well, shopping (sadly) is one of my chores. And I certainly don't want to do it over the weekend when I need to be sleeping and recuperating to make myself feel normal again. When I got up, I made coffee, noted (by seeing her posts on Facebook) that Daisy was out for the evening with one of her friends, as is customary for her on Wednesday nights, and paid my cable bill that arrived in the mail yesterday (there's another $57 gone). What I really want to do, though I don't know if it's what I'll actually do, is get something quick and easy to eat from Walmart -- Hot Pockets or something like that, something different than what I normally eat -- and get the DVD of World War Z, and spend the rest of my night in relaxation before I have to teach in the morning. I have so, so few luxuries in life. Spending a night with cheap, more-bad-for-me-than-good food and a new movie is really all I have time for anymore during the semester. It's not much different when Daisy is here, either. At least I can justify it by having not slept well all week, and having felt like shit since...oh, Sunday or so.
In the morning, I shall teach, and it shall be as short of a class as possible. Workshops yesterday went well enough, I suppose, though I had more absences in that class yesterday than I've had all semester, and it was still -- for the first one or two students up for workshop, anyway -- like pulling teeth to get them to talk about their peers' papers. Tomorrow it's a little different. We have one workshop paper left to get through (one of those aforementioned absences yesterday) and then peer-review for the rest of the class. Their final copies come in on Tuesday, and I start the next unit then -- meaning that I have to ready the assignment sheets and the like for them over this weekend.
In the meantime? Bad food and zombies. And sleep.
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