Campus confidential, p.5
Campus Confidential, page 5
“Don’t be a re—don’t be a dick—oh fuck—sorry, Professor H,” said Madison. “Bet professors don’t talk like this, do they?”
“They beat it out of us pretty hard in PhD school,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what my dad says. He wants me to go to grad school, but I said fu—screw that. I hate this fu—sucking place, you know what I’m saying? ‘Cept for Russian class, ‘cause Cahill was such a spazz and Brandy was, well...”
“It must be hard to come back without him,” I said.
“Yeah, well...your CubID number is there on your roster, so you should be able to access whatever you need now, set up whatever you need to. Just give us a holler if you need help, okay? I’ll be here until noon.”
“Thanks, Madison. You’ve been super-helpful.”
“Anything for my favorite new prof,” said Madison, with a sincerity that seemed only somewhat feigned.
8
Using my illicitly-gained access to The Den, I spent the next couple of hours setting up my course websites, with only occasional calls to Madison for help. Like most other university online systems I had encountered, The Den and Cubmail were clunky, opaque, and difficult to access for their legitimate users, but easy to hack, or so it seemed by the way Madison breezily got into the areas that were closed to me, even though I was faculty and she was a student. I resolved to keep all my grades on a spreadsheet on my password-protected personal laptop, and only post them occasionally in The Den, and double-check them before submitting. I also resolved to avoid online quizzes, saving paper be damned.
“Does everyone have this much trouble setting things up?” I asked Madison, after she had helped me upload my syllabi when the system locked me out for the third time.
“Yeah, most profs are totes clueless when it comes to doing any of this shit.”
“I’m not clueless,” I said. “I know my way around the web and a computer as well as most.”
“Yeah, but our system requires a special touch, you know what I’m saying? You have to, like, wear your panties backwards and kiss the Blarney stone three times before you approach it. Most profs don’t have the patience.”
“Don’t they have problems with people like you hacking in and changing grades?” I asked.
Madison grinned. “Of course not. Actually, that’s harder to do than most other things. The actual, official grades are pretty secure. The registrar’s office is behind a serious firewall, and they don’t let work-studies have anything to do with that. But the course websites and Cubmail—anyone with admin privileges can get into that. And the algorithms for automatically calculating the grades can get fucked up all on their own—actually, that’s where most of the problem come from. So I’d check the grades the site gives you before entering them into the registrar’s site.”
“Awesome,” I said. “I’m so thrilled that using these systems is mandatory.”
“Yeah, whatevs. If you post anything on Cubmail you don’t want other people reading, you deserve to get caught, that’s what I say.”
“I have to agree.” And I did. TLASC, like every other institution of higher education that I knew of, was freaking out about privacy, on the one hand, and inappropriate behavior and potential active shooters, on the other. All faculty-student communications were supposed to go through Cubmail, and all emails could be accessed by the administration in case of need. Or, apparently, by an enterprising work-study like Madison whenever she felt like it.
This led to some ugly complications with FERPA, since as I’d just told Madison, random strangers were not supposed to be able to see student grades, which could potentially happen if a student requested (in writing, of course) that their current grade be emailed to them, only to have that email read for whatever reason by someone in administration...not my problem, I decided. I would continue to provide students with their current grades upon request and generally act as I saw fit, and not worry too much over who was reading my emails and sneaking into my course websites. And I would keep my master gradebook and all sensitive or important materials on my own laptop, and only use Cubmail for TLASC-related communications. I wasn’t going to be here long enough to bother switching over to TLASC-provided anything anyway.
Once the course websites were set up to my satisfaction, I briefly considered doing my FERPA, Title IX, Campus Health and Safety, and Student Wellbeing training modules, but those turned out to be video courses that would take ages, and I was starting to get antsy from sitting for so long in one place, so, thanking Madison for her help and getting a cheery wave, only slightly spoiled by her wiping her nose before and afterwards, in response, I packed up and headed home.
Once home I decompressed from computer work by unpacking a few more boxes, but that soon got boring, and I didn’t want to unpack too much anyway, since it would all have to be packed back up in four months, so I shoved a bunch of still-unopened boxes in the bedroom closet, put the hanging rod back up after it fell down on my head as I was shoving in the boxes, checked on Fevronia—still in a snit—lurked for a few minutes on The Wiki in the hopes that some new, awesome, incredible, just-perfect job that the other 150 candidates currently on the active prowl wouldn’t bother to apply for would have shown up since last night, and then, unable to put it off any more, did all the training modules.
When I was done it was mid-afternoon and I had gleaned many important pieces of wisdom, such as not using a rolling chair as a stepladder when trying to reach something on a high shelf, or not picking up broken glass with your bare hands, but instead sweeping it up with a broom and dustpan. I also correctly answered a number of questions about proper ergonomic posture, reducing eye fatigue, and maintaining proper mental health.
I also learned—for about the fifth time—that I could not release student grades to third parties without the student’s written permission, and that I was required to report all suspected cases of sexual assault. No mention of what would happen once the case was reported, but if precedent was any guide, the assaulter would be given a slap on the wrist—probably while whining loudly about how Title IX was ruining his life and destroying his future and how hard it was to be a male in America these days—and the assaultee would be hounded out of the school and end up addicted and suicidal. And I learned how to report my concerns about student wellbeing, and what the college wanted me to do if I thought a student might be about to shoot themself and/or 27 of their peers.
The Office of the Provost has launched an innovative initiative to promote student wellbeing, I was informed. Faculty and staff are a vital part of this important and timely initiative, and are essential to creating a safe campus atmosphere where students can flourish and unlock their full potential. TLASC is committed to creating an environment where students can not only develop intellectually, but where they feel truly cared for and part of a vibrant and diverse community, one that promotes the values of tolerance, civility, and mutual wellbeing. We all have a responsibility to care for each other and make our shared TLASC experience one we can all look back on with fondness!
This was followed by instructions on how to have suspicious-looking students arrested, committed to a mental institution, or shot down by SWAT teams. I consoled myself with the thought that at least I was not required to come to class packing a gun—yet—and, correctly answering the necessary number of questions, passed my mandatory training with an A.
9
The next day was Wednesday. Class day. I started off with another dawn jog, this time ending up in a neighborhood that just had normal trash on the streets, not rotten sofas, used condoms, and discarded hypodermic needles, so I did my usual two miles and had a short but rewarding conversation with a couple of people stepping out of the grits-and-greens place I had driven by on Monday, which served as the boundary between the working-class neighborhood that was between it and my apartment complex, and the drug-dealing-class neighborhood that was between it and campus.
It turned out we—the two men stepping out of True Grit, as a faded, peeling sign proclaimed it to be, and me—all had family in Atlanta, which gave us something to bond over. The effect was only slightly spoiled by them remarking first on my bright blue running shoes and then on my legs and asking me if I had a boyfriend.
“Yes,” I said.
“Back in Atlanta?” asked the more forward of the two men, who had introduced himself as Jimmy. Judging by the weathering on his face, he must have been approaching fifty, or maybe he was really my age but a lifetime of smoking and manual labor had worn him out before his time. He had the truly black skin you rarely saw on Americans except amongst immigrants and the very poor, and was missing half his teeth.
“He’s deployed,” I said.
This led to another brief round of bonding, as both the men had served and currently had nephews serving, and I was able to run off before they could demand to know more about my boyfriend and I would have had to decide how much to tell them of the truth and how much to pretend that John was my boyfriend. John wouldn’t mind, and had in fact told me on multiple occasions to tell any men hassling me exactly that, but it always felt icky to me to pass my brother off as my boyfriend in order to escape unwanted sexual advances.
I fled fast enough to almost outpace the two men’s comments about the pros and cons of my skinny white girl ass, but not fast enough to outpace the knowledge that if I were to complain about this to anyone, or even mention it, I would be treated to a double whammy of criticism, first for wandering into the wrong neighborhood and thus bringing about my own harassment, and second for being a white woman complaining about sexual harassment by black men, because it had recently been decided that complaining about or fighting back against street harassment of women was racist.
Which it was, in the sense that 98% of the street harassment I had ever received in America had been from working-class black and Latino men like that pair there. Lucky for me I had spent enough time being sexually harassed to have built up a high tolerance for it and a number of survival tactics, like being super-nice and then sprinting off down the sidewalk at a high turn of speed.
Once back at my apartment I fended off a sneak attack from Fevronia, did my forms and asanas, and then, wanting to make sure I got there in plenty of time to get someone else to let me into my classrooms, dressed in my teaching clothes and set off for campus.
The two exits I traveled on Route 1 were two exits too many, especially with the Honda’s dicky transmission. I was just going to drive through the drug dealer neighborhood, I decided: my chances of dying were slimmer.
And once I got to campus, I almost had another wreck trying to get into the faculty parking lot behind the football stadium, which was now filling up rapidly with people who seemed even more stressed out than me. The delay caused by my exchange with the parking lot guard, who had to examine my TLASC parking hangtag, which HR had managed to get to me prior to the beginning of classes, unlike everything else, and interrogate me about why I didn’t have a proper CubID to swipe myself in, led to a lot of honking in the line behind me, and then people trying to cut around me as I finally pulled through the gate and into the lot.
I found a spot in a far corner and, loading myself up with my laptop, my course files, my textbooks, my water bottle, and my purse, I joined the exodus of stressed-out, overladen people trying to run in badly-fitting suits without dropping piles of paperwork or very expensive laptops onto the pavement. Some had more success than others: the bag of the woman in front of me split open as she attempted to jog in a threadbare pencil skirt and last year’s unflattering kitten heels.
“Here,” I said, kneeling down to help her gather up what looked like dozens of handouts for an introductory German course. “Oh, hi, Kate.”
“Thanks,” said Kate, sounding too frazzled to be grateful. “Oh crap, is that the time. Gotta go!” She swept up the handouts in a crumpled armhold and dashed off in the run of someone who avoided exercise except under duress.
Feeling smug about my fitness and punctuality, I made my way at a more leisurely pace to Dreme Hall, where I dropped off my textbooks and files for my RUSS 201 class in the adjunct warehouse, spent a few minutes reviewing my roster and lesson plan for RUSS 101, got some rather vague directions from a harried-looking Linda on where to find Angelo Hall, and set off to teach my first class as a real, genuine professor. Well, sort of. A real, genuine, part-time VAP on a temporary contract with no benefits. But still, this was it! I was living the dream! Doing the job that I had spent so long and worked so hard to get! Granted, it was exactly the same job I had been doing for the past several years, except for less money, and it could be a little less humiliating and more glamorous, but it could be worse. I could be working in a chicken processing plant, for example.
Angelo Hall turned out to be a brand-new neocolonial brick building behind Parson Library. It was so new that they were still rolling out the sod on the landscaping around it as I walked up, staying carefully between the freshly painted black chains that lined all the walkways around the quad and the classroom buildings.
When I stepped in, the building still smelled like fresh construction, and the walls gleamed with new white paint, with hardly a scuffmark in sight. Big windows let in the morning light, and the whole thing looked like an advertisement for a modern liberal arts education, right down to the smart consoles at the head of every classroom, which looked like they could be used to guide a probe to Mars. I could just imagine myself setting up all sorts of fabulous learning experiences for the students...watching authentic news programs, getting Skype calls direct from Russia in order to chat with native speakers...these things never worked as well as I thought they should, but in this beautiful building, surely the tech and the timing would work, and the students would sit there with rapt attention, marveling at the opportunities their tuition dollars were buying them.
Angelo 027 was not, though, in one of the light and spacious classrooms near the entrance, but in a back corner in the basement with no windows and a distinctly chemically smell. I took shallow breaths as I waited out in the corridor, telling myself that there was plenty of oxygen down here, no problem, it would be no problem to keep my focus and keep everyone awake in this airless environment, and I wasn’t claustrophobic at all, no way.
My lack of claustrophobia made itself ever more acutely felt as the corridor began filling up with students waiting to get into their 10:00am classes. The door to Angelo 027 opened at 9:53, and drowsy-eyed students began filing out. I slipped in past the last one, where I found Kate gathering up her things with shaking hands.
“Oh, hey again,” I said. “This must be the department’s go-to classroom in Angelo.”
“Yeah, we’re so lucky to get a room in the new building,” she said, her voice trembling. “Only there are no dry-erase markers for the whiteboards, and I forgot to bring any for myself.”
“What do you mean, there are no markers?”
“Didn’t they tell you? They don’t keep markers and chalk in the classrooms. You have to bring your own. Only I only brought chalk.”
“They expect us to bring our own markers?”
“Well, the department will issue you with two a month. But you have to remember to get them from Linda, and she has to be in the right mood to give them to you. I always carry around a box of chalk with me, but I totally forgot my markers this morning. And there were too many students and not enough chairs, so some of them had to go out and steal chairs from one of the classrooms down the hall, and we got into trouble for that and someone from the history department came and complained and was really rude about it, and threatened to report the class to the fire department. It’s not my fault they put me here and then overenrolled my class! And then I couldn’t sign into the smart system, so I called IT, so that ate up, like, half my class time, and then they said the system was down on this floor anyway, so my whole lesson plan was pretty much down the toilet, and the students, well, they were sort of nice about it, I guess, but some were laughing at me, and some of them were pissed, I could tell, and to be fair, I’d be pissed too, if I were them. I mean, we wasted the entire class session, just wasted it, and you know how precious class time is, especially in 101!”
“That sucks. I hope your next class goes better.”
“Yeah...it’s 201, and I know those kids, so...maybe. Some of them are okay. And then this afternoon I have to drive over and teach a 101 class at Tech.” Kate jammed the rest of her handouts into her bag, along with her laptop and her box of crumbling chalk, and made her sad way out of the classroom, stepping back and nervously letting in two big boys in leather jackets who had “immigrant from the former USSR” written all over them.
Warned by Kate’s fiasco, I collared the bigger of the two boys, who introduced himself as Danila, from Odessa, and sent him off on a mission to steal any loose dry erase markers he could find. He and his new friend, Vitya from Minsk, brightened at the possibility of doing anything criminal, and ran off jauntily, speaking to each other in a mix of slightly accented English and broken Russian.
“I think they will be trouble,” said a girl they had almost bowled over on their way out the classroom. She had big ash-blonde hair and a pouty mouth and an attitude I instantly recognized as Insecure Russian Girl Posturing.
“If they can get us some markers, they’ll be doing a service to their Motherland,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Ira,” she said, sitting down and crossing her arms defensively over her ample breasts. “Are you Russian? I already speak Russian; I’m not sure I should be here.”
“I’m not Russian but I’ve spent a lot of time there.” Time on the ground counted for more amongst Russian speakers than formal education, which was both a blessing and a curse. “Can you read and write?”
“A little,” she said, hugging herself more tightly in a way that said it was only a very, very little.
“Well, why don’t you spend a couple of days in this class, see how it goes. You can always move up into 201 if that seems more appropriate.”
“They beat it out of us pretty hard in PhD school,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what my dad says. He wants me to go to grad school, but I said fu—screw that. I hate this fu—sucking place, you know what I’m saying? ‘Cept for Russian class, ‘cause Cahill was such a spazz and Brandy was, well...”
“It must be hard to come back without him,” I said.
“Yeah, well...your CubID number is there on your roster, so you should be able to access whatever you need now, set up whatever you need to. Just give us a holler if you need help, okay? I’ll be here until noon.”
“Thanks, Madison. You’ve been super-helpful.”
“Anything for my favorite new prof,” said Madison, with a sincerity that seemed only somewhat feigned.
8
Using my illicitly-gained access to The Den, I spent the next couple of hours setting up my course websites, with only occasional calls to Madison for help. Like most other university online systems I had encountered, The Den and Cubmail were clunky, opaque, and difficult to access for their legitimate users, but easy to hack, or so it seemed by the way Madison breezily got into the areas that were closed to me, even though I was faculty and she was a student. I resolved to keep all my grades on a spreadsheet on my password-protected personal laptop, and only post them occasionally in The Den, and double-check them before submitting. I also resolved to avoid online quizzes, saving paper be damned.
“Does everyone have this much trouble setting things up?” I asked Madison, after she had helped me upload my syllabi when the system locked me out for the third time.
“Yeah, most profs are totes clueless when it comes to doing any of this shit.”
“I’m not clueless,” I said. “I know my way around the web and a computer as well as most.”
“Yeah, but our system requires a special touch, you know what I’m saying? You have to, like, wear your panties backwards and kiss the Blarney stone three times before you approach it. Most profs don’t have the patience.”
“Don’t they have problems with people like you hacking in and changing grades?” I asked.
Madison grinned. “Of course not. Actually, that’s harder to do than most other things. The actual, official grades are pretty secure. The registrar’s office is behind a serious firewall, and they don’t let work-studies have anything to do with that. But the course websites and Cubmail—anyone with admin privileges can get into that. And the algorithms for automatically calculating the grades can get fucked up all on their own—actually, that’s where most of the problem come from. So I’d check the grades the site gives you before entering them into the registrar’s site.”
“Awesome,” I said. “I’m so thrilled that using these systems is mandatory.”
“Yeah, whatevs. If you post anything on Cubmail you don’t want other people reading, you deserve to get caught, that’s what I say.”
“I have to agree.” And I did. TLASC, like every other institution of higher education that I knew of, was freaking out about privacy, on the one hand, and inappropriate behavior and potential active shooters, on the other. All faculty-student communications were supposed to go through Cubmail, and all emails could be accessed by the administration in case of need. Or, apparently, by an enterprising work-study like Madison whenever she felt like it.
This led to some ugly complications with FERPA, since as I’d just told Madison, random strangers were not supposed to be able to see student grades, which could potentially happen if a student requested (in writing, of course) that their current grade be emailed to them, only to have that email read for whatever reason by someone in administration...not my problem, I decided. I would continue to provide students with their current grades upon request and generally act as I saw fit, and not worry too much over who was reading my emails and sneaking into my course websites. And I would keep my master gradebook and all sensitive or important materials on my own laptop, and only use Cubmail for TLASC-related communications. I wasn’t going to be here long enough to bother switching over to TLASC-provided anything anyway.
Once the course websites were set up to my satisfaction, I briefly considered doing my FERPA, Title IX, Campus Health and Safety, and Student Wellbeing training modules, but those turned out to be video courses that would take ages, and I was starting to get antsy from sitting for so long in one place, so, thanking Madison for her help and getting a cheery wave, only slightly spoiled by her wiping her nose before and afterwards, in response, I packed up and headed home.
Once home I decompressed from computer work by unpacking a few more boxes, but that soon got boring, and I didn’t want to unpack too much anyway, since it would all have to be packed back up in four months, so I shoved a bunch of still-unopened boxes in the bedroom closet, put the hanging rod back up after it fell down on my head as I was shoving in the boxes, checked on Fevronia—still in a snit—lurked for a few minutes on The Wiki in the hopes that some new, awesome, incredible, just-perfect job that the other 150 candidates currently on the active prowl wouldn’t bother to apply for would have shown up since last night, and then, unable to put it off any more, did all the training modules.
When I was done it was mid-afternoon and I had gleaned many important pieces of wisdom, such as not using a rolling chair as a stepladder when trying to reach something on a high shelf, or not picking up broken glass with your bare hands, but instead sweeping it up with a broom and dustpan. I also correctly answered a number of questions about proper ergonomic posture, reducing eye fatigue, and maintaining proper mental health.
I also learned—for about the fifth time—that I could not release student grades to third parties without the student’s written permission, and that I was required to report all suspected cases of sexual assault. No mention of what would happen once the case was reported, but if precedent was any guide, the assaulter would be given a slap on the wrist—probably while whining loudly about how Title IX was ruining his life and destroying his future and how hard it was to be a male in America these days—and the assaultee would be hounded out of the school and end up addicted and suicidal. And I learned how to report my concerns about student wellbeing, and what the college wanted me to do if I thought a student might be about to shoot themself and/or 27 of their peers.
The Office of the Provost has launched an innovative initiative to promote student wellbeing, I was informed. Faculty and staff are a vital part of this important and timely initiative, and are essential to creating a safe campus atmosphere where students can flourish and unlock their full potential. TLASC is committed to creating an environment where students can not only develop intellectually, but where they feel truly cared for and part of a vibrant and diverse community, one that promotes the values of tolerance, civility, and mutual wellbeing. We all have a responsibility to care for each other and make our shared TLASC experience one we can all look back on with fondness!
This was followed by instructions on how to have suspicious-looking students arrested, committed to a mental institution, or shot down by SWAT teams. I consoled myself with the thought that at least I was not required to come to class packing a gun—yet—and, correctly answering the necessary number of questions, passed my mandatory training with an A.
9
The next day was Wednesday. Class day. I started off with another dawn jog, this time ending up in a neighborhood that just had normal trash on the streets, not rotten sofas, used condoms, and discarded hypodermic needles, so I did my usual two miles and had a short but rewarding conversation with a couple of people stepping out of the grits-and-greens place I had driven by on Monday, which served as the boundary between the working-class neighborhood that was between it and my apartment complex, and the drug-dealing-class neighborhood that was between it and campus.
It turned out we—the two men stepping out of True Grit, as a faded, peeling sign proclaimed it to be, and me—all had family in Atlanta, which gave us something to bond over. The effect was only slightly spoiled by them remarking first on my bright blue running shoes and then on my legs and asking me if I had a boyfriend.
“Yes,” I said.
“Back in Atlanta?” asked the more forward of the two men, who had introduced himself as Jimmy. Judging by the weathering on his face, he must have been approaching fifty, or maybe he was really my age but a lifetime of smoking and manual labor had worn him out before his time. He had the truly black skin you rarely saw on Americans except amongst immigrants and the very poor, and was missing half his teeth.
“He’s deployed,” I said.
This led to another brief round of bonding, as both the men had served and currently had nephews serving, and I was able to run off before they could demand to know more about my boyfriend and I would have had to decide how much to tell them of the truth and how much to pretend that John was my boyfriend. John wouldn’t mind, and had in fact told me on multiple occasions to tell any men hassling me exactly that, but it always felt icky to me to pass my brother off as my boyfriend in order to escape unwanted sexual advances.
I fled fast enough to almost outpace the two men’s comments about the pros and cons of my skinny white girl ass, but not fast enough to outpace the knowledge that if I were to complain about this to anyone, or even mention it, I would be treated to a double whammy of criticism, first for wandering into the wrong neighborhood and thus bringing about my own harassment, and second for being a white woman complaining about sexual harassment by black men, because it had recently been decided that complaining about or fighting back against street harassment of women was racist.
Which it was, in the sense that 98% of the street harassment I had ever received in America had been from working-class black and Latino men like that pair there. Lucky for me I had spent enough time being sexually harassed to have built up a high tolerance for it and a number of survival tactics, like being super-nice and then sprinting off down the sidewalk at a high turn of speed.
Once back at my apartment I fended off a sneak attack from Fevronia, did my forms and asanas, and then, wanting to make sure I got there in plenty of time to get someone else to let me into my classrooms, dressed in my teaching clothes and set off for campus.
The two exits I traveled on Route 1 were two exits too many, especially with the Honda’s dicky transmission. I was just going to drive through the drug dealer neighborhood, I decided: my chances of dying were slimmer.
And once I got to campus, I almost had another wreck trying to get into the faculty parking lot behind the football stadium, which was now filling up rapidly with people who seemed even more stressed out than me. The delay caused by my exchange with the parking lot guard, who had to examine my TLASC parking hangtag, which HR had managed to get to me prior to the beginning of classes, unlike everything else, and interrogate me about why I didn’t have a proper CubID to swipe myself in, led to a lot of honking in the line behind me, and then people trying to cut around me as I finally pulled through the gate and into the lot.
I found a spot in a far corner and, loading myself up with my laptop, my course files, my textbooks, my water bottle, and my purse, I joined the exodus of stressed-out, overladen people trying to run in badly-fitting suits without dropping piles of paperwork or very expensive laptops onto the pavement. Some had more success than others: the bag of the woman in front of me split open as she attempted to jog in a threadbare pencil skirt and last year’s unflattering kitten heels.
“Here,” I said, kneeling down to help her gather up what looked like dozens of handouts for an introductory German course. “Oh, hi, Kate.”
“Thanks,” said Kate, sounding too frazzled to be grateful. “Oh crap, is that the time. Gotta go!” She swept up the handouts in a crumpled armhold and dashed off in the run of someone who avoided exercise except under duress.
Feeling smug about my fitness and punctuality, I made my way at a more leisurely pace to Dreme Hall, where I dropped off my textbooks and files for my RUSS 201 class in the adjunct warehouse, spent a few minutes reviewing my roster and lesson plan for RUSS 101, got some rather vague directions from a harried-looking Linda on where to find Angelo Hall, and set off to teach my first class as a real, genuine professor. Well, sort of. A real, genuine, part-time VAP on a temporary contract with no benefits. But still, this was it! I was living the dream! Doing the job that I had spent so long and worked so hard to get! Granted, it was exactly the same job I had been doing for the past several years, except for less money, and it could be a little less humiliating and more glamorous, but it could be worse. I could be working in a chicken processing plant, for example.
Angelo Hall turned out to be a brand-new neocolonial brick building behind Parson Library. It was so new that they were still rolling out the sod on the landscaping around it as I walked up, staying carefully between the freshly painted black chains that lined all the walkways around the quad and the classroom buildings.
When I stepped in, the building still smelled like fresh construction, and the walls gleamed with new white paint, with hardly a scuffmark in sight. Big windows let in the morning light, and the whole thing looked like an advertisement for a modern liberal arts education, right down to the smart consoles at the head of every classroom, which looked like they could be used to guide a probe to Mars. I could just imagine myself setting up all sorts of fabulous learning experiences for the students...watching authentic news programs, getting Skype calls direct from Russia in order to chat with native speakers...these things never worked as well as I thought they should, but in this beautiful building, surely the tech and the timing would work, and the students would sit there with rapt attention, marveling at the opportunities their tuition dollars were buying them.
Angelo 027 was not, though, in one of the light and spacious classrooms near the entrance, but in a back corner in the basement with no windows and a distinctly chemically smell. I took shallow breaths as I waited out in the corridor, telling myself that there was plenty of oxygen down here, no problem, it would be no problem to keep my focus and keep everyone awake in this airless environment, and I wasn’t claustrophobic at all, no way.
My lack of claustrophobia made itself ever more acutely felt as the corridor began filling up with students waiting to get into their 10:00am classes. The door to Angelo 027 opened at 9:53, and drowsy-eyed students began filing out. I slipped in past the last one, where I found Kate gathering up her things with shaking hands.
“Oh, hey again,” I said. “This must be the department’s go-to classroom in Angelo.”
“Yeah, we’re so lucky to get a room in the new building,” she said, her voice trembling. “Only there are no dry-erase markers for the whiteboards, and I forgot to bring any for myself.”
“What do you mean, there are no markers?”
“Didn’t they tell you? They don’t keep markers and chalk in the classrooms. You have to bring your own. Only I only brought chalk.”
“They expect us to bring our own markers?”
“Well, the department will issue you with two a month. But you have to remember to get them from Linda, and she has to be in the right mood to give them to you. I always carry around a box of chalk with me, but I totally forgot my markers this morning. And there were too many students and not enough chairs, so some of them had to go out and steal chairs from one of the classrooms down the hall, and we got into trouble for that and someone from the history department came and complained and was really rude about it, and threatened to report the class to the fire department. It’s not my fault they put me here and then overenrolled my class! And then I couldn’t sign into the smart system, so I called IT, so that ate up, like, half my class time, and then they said the system was down on this floor anyway, so my whole lesson plan was pretty much down the toilet, and the students, well, they were sort of nice about it, I guess, but some were laughing at me, and some of them were pissed, I could tell, and to be fair, I’d be pissed too, if I were them. I mean, we wasted the entire class session, just wasted it, and you know how precious class time is, especially in 101!”
“That sucks. I hope your next class goes better.”
“Yeah...it’s 201, and I know those kids, so...maybe. Some of them are okay. And then this afternoon I have to drive over and teach a 101 class at Tech.” Kate jammed the rest of her handouts into her bag, along with her laptop and her box of crumbling chalk, and made her sad way out of the classroom, stepping back and nervously letting in two big boys in leather jackets who had “immigrant from the former USSR” written all over them.
Warned by Kate’s fiasco, I collared the bigger of the two boys, who introduced himself as Danila, from Odessa, and sent him off on a mission to steal any loose dry erase markers he could find. He and his new friend, Vitya from Minsk, brightened at the possibility of doing anything criminal, and ran off jauntily, speaking to each other in a mix of slightly accented English and broken Russian.
“I think they will be trouble,” said a girl they had almost bowled over on their way out the classroom. She had big ash-blonde hair and a pouty mouth and an attitude I instantly recognized as Insecure Russian Girl Posturing.
“If they can get us some markers, they’ll be doing a service to their Motherland,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Ira,” she said, sitting down and crossing her arms defensively over her ample breasts. “Are you Russian? I already speak Russian; I’m not sure I should be here.”
“I’m not Russian but I’ve spent a lot of time there.” Time on the ground counted for more amongst Russian speakers than formal education, which was both a blessing and a curse. “Can you read and write?”
“A little,” she said, hugging herself more tightly in a way that said it was only a very, very little.
“Well, why don’t you spend a couple of days in this class, see how it goes. You can always move up into 201 if that seems more appropriate.”
