By Caprice Lawless
We watch in great sadness as, one by
one, gifted teachers leave our college without so much as a farewell from
administration or from the departments in which they served. A few leave for
what they know may be temporary, albeit better-paying jobs in other colleges
and universities. Most leave education altogether, vowing never to return to
the particular types of humiliation and contempt faced by those who dare teach
in this state’s community colleges.
Those of us who remain wonder what
are we teaching and modeling by our teaching. Increasingly, students are
becoming aware that many of them earn more in their espresso-pouring and other retail
jobs than we do teaching them college courses. Some of our students, not
surprisingly, have begun to connect the dots and question the purpose of their
academic pursuits if their teachers live in poverty.
Yet don’t we model poverty for our
students? Wordlessly, we teach them how to expect not a bright future, but, in fact, a
decidedly dim one. Each time we enter a classroom, we show them how to make do
with used clothing, sack lunches and reconditioned electronics. When we go to
work sick (and we all do, as we have no health insurance or sick leave), we
show them how to get through a work day by keeping the decongestant and a box
tissues handy. Of course they realize we are spreading illnesses to them. They
see that this is what is in store for them, as well, once they get their
college degrees. They are watching professionals who are deeply in debt for
their own degrees work even while ill, and for peanuts.
We unintentionally teach them to become wise to the
ruse; that the sprinkling of words like “future,” “planning” and “integrity” in
class schedules and college programs are there to serve only the careers of the
invisible administrators, the ones never seen in hallways or cafeterias. They
are learning that, similarly, they will never see their administrators either,
and, should one appear, it is likely time to worry. We model for them not to
expect too much, once you graduate, from anyone in leadership, for leadership
is in a class of its own making and is self-serving.
When they watch us load our files into our aging
cars, they can see that college teachers have so little status they don’t even
have a place to store their things in the schools their labor has helped build.
When we run into our students in food banks, at subsidized clinics, and in used
clothing stores, we are teaching them that even “making ends meet” is a quaint
and meaningless phrase.
A colleague of mine taught her
classes for a week on a broken leg. Her students saw her in the hallway, crying
in pain. Another adjunct taught for two weeks after he had been diagnosed with
shingles. He was so weak he could not even carry his books. His students
carried them for him. He could walk only part way down the long corridor before
he had to stop and sit a while. What did his students learn during that episode
about the value of three college degrees?
Alas, when we teach them to
recognize cries for justice in essays they study, do those cries fall on deaf
ears? Are we are teaching them to be numb to human suffering? Posters in our
hallways promise hope and opportunity, but we wonder whether the work life of
their highly educated teachers offers a convincing counter argument.
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