Have You Thought About Teaching?

Piece of chalk and blackboard (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is one of the questions I’m asked most frequently when people hear that my full-time museum job was eliminated. Often, it turns out that the asker is thinking about college or community college teaching.

I totally understand why this seems logical. After all my career has mostly been in teaching and learning–albeit outside the classroom–and in a core subject that almost every institution of higher learning has multiple classes in every semester. I don’t have a Ph.D., but I do have a subject area MA, which is generally enough to qualify you to teach in community colleges and maybe, sometimes, in certain circumstances, to teach special classes at four year colleges (though almost never on an ongoing or full-time basis).

I exist on the fringes of the academic world, sort of on the periphery of a cluster of occupations that are coming to be known as alt-ac, or alternate academic careers — the sort of things that involve advanced learning and are often embedded in, or contiguous to the academic context without actually constituting the traditional faculty role. So I’m pretty attuned to what’s going on in academia in ways that I forget  many people are not.

And that’s why I know that it doesn’t make much sense for me to think about teaching as a major career direction. It’s because of things like this. And this.

It’s worth the time to take a look at the links if you’re interested in higher education or labor conditions. Or if you’re thinking about going to graduate school in the humanities. But for those who don’t have the time, the bottom line is that most teaching jobs these days involve adjunct positions (i.e. part-time, pay-per-course gigs). As summarized in the ProfHacker post linked above, this often means you max out the number of courses you can teach, while earning about $375 / week. “Depending on the number of hours this faculty member spends with course preparation, teaching, grading, and student conferencing, this professor’s hourly rate is often below the national minimum wage.  It’s important to keep in mind that this rate does not usually include any kind of health insurance or retirement benefits.”

It is not, unfortunately, particularly unusual for those college teachers to qualify for food stamps or other forms of public assistance, or to find that they’re stuck in a pattern that they can’t get out of, partly because they’re working every spare minute to keep their heads above water.

That, in a nutshell, is why I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about teaching.

Mapping

I’ve got some catching up to do here. First off, this is the completed version of a post I started a couple of weeks ago.

 

Captain Field's Improved Parallel Rule, c. 1854, uploaded by Rodhullandemu to Wikimedia Commons

My job search is a bit amorphous right now. Yes, I’m looking at job announcements for full-time museum positions, especially those that involve history research, writing, interpretive planning, or curatorial work. I’m also thinking about transferable skills and where else they might be useful. I’m working as a contractor on some projects for my old museum, and setting up a small business infrastructure to take on other freelance work if the opportunity presents itself. I’m open to an economic strategy that involves combining different temp, part-time, or sideline work. And I’m consciously thinking of frugality as part of my strategy. After all, money not spent is money I don’t have to earn.

On the ground, this being open to multiple options sometimes translates into aimless wandering.  Or at least that’s how I suspect it looks from the outside. As someone who likes to have everything all planned out, I cringe a little bit when kind people making small talk ask me about my job hunt and I hear how unfocused my response sounds. Or when I have to admit that I have a privilege license and a tax id, but only worked on a business plan briefly one morning before becoming absorbed in another task.

Beneath the self-consciousness, though, I really do believe there’s some sense in what I’m doing.

I found myself in a hands-on workshop on eighteenth-century surveying and map-making techniques recently. (Yes, I know, the very idea of finding yourself in a class on how to plot roads the 1700s way is enough to provoke snorts from most of you. All except the select few who are deeply jealous.) Here’s the one thing I learned that will stick with me longest: you start the map by marking all your angles. You might be tempted to mark your starting point, use the protractor to find the angle to your first landmark, measure the distance, make a dot, move the protractor to the dot, find the next angle, etc. But every time you move the protractor, you introduce a new opportunity for error. Maybe you place it only a fraction of a degree off its previous orientation, but those fractions add up over time.  So, you place the protractor once, mark all the bearings you’re going to need, and then use a parallel rule to “walk” the angle to wherever on the paper you need to draw your line.

Not only did I find this process deeply satisfying in some mysterious way (perhaps similar to what some people get out of knitting?), it also gave me a useful way to think about my current career juncture.

I may look like I’m standing around looking off in a lot of directions while putting off actually moving. Really though, I’m finding my bearings.

Mental Mini-Vacation

I haven’t had the urge, or time, or energy to say much recently. So I’ll simply share this link to some gorgeous, starkly beautiful photography of the Highlands. Spending a few minutes mentally immersed in the landscapes has done my heart good this morning.