Bittersweet Beginnings: After Adjuncting

Yesterday, I did something I never thought I would do. I formally gave up my teaching position. This Fall, no one will call me Professor Papaioannou. I won't get to enjoy the shocked looks when someone asks me what I do for a living, and I tell them I teach at a university. I won't meet a new classroom full of new students who rely on me for guidance and support. I won't get to have the wonderful exchanges with colleagues during meetings and project building sessions. It's really a very bittersweet moment for me.

I love teaching. I do. I love students and collaboration and leadership and everything that comes with it-- except the system of adjuncting itself, which leaves you in a constant survival loop all for the chance of finding a job someday maybe. Leaving teaching behind really had to do with stability. I became anxious all the time, wondering how I would pay my bills or how I would find time to squeeze in writing my dissertation (which is costing me over $1300 a semester to write). I started to doubt that I was good enough to be in a doctoral program because I couldn't clear my head enough to make sense of my research. It made me feel like I would never finish or never get to reach the other life goals that I had for myself. This is something I hear almost every doctoral student starts to experience as they near the end phase of their degree. It might seem to some as impatience or not being able to deal with being uncomfortable, but it became about a basic quality of life.

A picture of me taken by a student
while teaching my first writing course

I started teaching 4 years ago as a doctoral teaching fellow during the 2010-2011 school year. The next year, I became an adjunct. I drove to Queens from central New Jersey once a week and spent my whole day on campus. The next year, I spent a semester on the Staten Island campus, which was a much shorter commute, before returning to Queens. Then, I took a job at my alma mater. I took the job because I was told it would be good prep for the possibility of a full-time position in the department, a Composition position that they had just gotten a line for. When that job came around, though, I was still working on my dissertation. I wasn't qualified for the position, and so I was passed over. I decided to stay on as an adjunct anyway because I loved the department and the students. Since the job search failed the first year, I figured I would try again the following year. Again, though, doing a qualitative study takes time, and I still didn't have the degree to qualify me for the position when the next year's job search came around. They found someone (who I happen think is a great fit), and I was left with the option to continue adjuncting at a university that was 86 miles away from home.

I intended to stay on this year, figuring that I needed to be teaching to be relevant after graduation and that the department was pleasant and the students were engaged. At the same time, the more I thought about this semester, the more anxious I became-- tuition, healthcare costs, commuting expenses that were topping out in the $3500 range per semester, hours spent in my car, and a lack of socialization because I couldn't afford to do anything anymore. I felt like I was paying to go to work. Some people would say to look at it like an internship, earning my way to a higher position, but let's be real-- no on wants to be an intern for 5 years. I also felt like every time I tried to go above and beyond, I was pushed back down, either by time constraints or unnecessary bureaucracy/micromanagement. I was afraid to talk to my advisor because I thought she'd just tell me I was being silly, that all doctoral students struggled, that real academics stayed in academia (she didn't, for the record). This all made me an unpleasant, unproductive person. I found myself complaining all the time to those around me. I didn't like the person I was becoming.

So I struck out and did some research to see what else I could do. And you know what I found? Lots. Lots of things that still involved education, writing, working collaboratively, making a positive impact, and being a leader. I realized that I was clinging to teaching in part because I liked the job, but also in very large part because I simply liked the respect that others outside of academia gave me for being a professor, especially because they always thought I was too young to be one, and because I felt that it was what was expected of me as a doctoral student. But liking that people are shocked at your title or living up to others' expectations for you aren't very good reasons for continuing to do something.

The minute I heard back from my supervisor acknowledging my resignation, I felt a huge weight lifted. For the first time in a long time, I didn't feel like I was hanging off the edge. I felt closer to completing all my goals, including my doctoral degree. I went to work at the writing center that day not stressed about making money to afford gas to get to work or finding time to revise syllabuses, but making a schedule to work on my dissertation and plotting what I could do with the money saved. It felt wonderful.

I am still a writing consultant, so it's not like student interaction and writing pedagogy have been completed yanked out of my life. And while I'm sure I'll miss teaching, I also have some fantastic opportunities on the horizon. I feel re-energized by the possibilities I find as I explore my options.

Does this mean I will never teach again? I don't know. At the moment, though, I'm pretty committed to the idea that I will never adjunct again. In truth, I'm not sure what this all means for me in the long term, but I do know that I'm excited to find out and that's way better than what I've been feeling for a while now.

A Wizard's Words of Wisdom

"Think of the solution, not the problem."

That is a line from one of my favorite books, The Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind. The book is mostly about Richard Cypher, a woodsman who faces enormous tragedy and learns that he is a wizard--- I think of the Sword of Truth Series as an adult version of the Harry Potter series (and highly recommend it to everyone!). In this moment, as Richard agonizes over all the way things could go wrong while trying to pretty much save the world, Zedd (Richard's mentor) tells Richard  he must "think of the solution, not the problem." This line stuck with me from the first time I read it nearly ten years ago.

This year, I've really tried to make this my mantra, and I thought that, in the midst of the chaos of the end of the semester/academic year, it was worth sharing with all of my educator and student friends out there.

In many ways, this mantra stands against a lot of what I've learned as a graduate student, where I've constantly been encouraged to problematize everything. Problematizing isn't a bad strategy for getting started, recognizing what's not working, but when it leaks into all facets of life, including your ability to complete tasks, problematizing can become a problem. I think many of us spend way too much time focusing on what's wrong instead of how to fix what's wrong, and all it does it give us things to fret about, to complain about, to write Facebook rants about.

But when it comes to practicality over intellectualizing, action over hypothesizing, sometimes, we just need to stop problematizing and focus on simplifying. This is especially true during finals season when things tend to pile up in sometimes conflicting ways. Sometimes, agonizing over all the ways that these problems can negatively impact you can actually prevent you from being able to take action, simply resulting in more stress.

When I stop thinking about everything on my plate or all the ways things could not work out, I become a better person. I focus in on my strategy and deal with problems as they come instead of panicking about problems that I may never face. I am less edgy and more productive (hey, look, even got a blog post done in the middle of conferencing and grading) because I have less floating around in my head to clog up my problem-solving abilities. I am nicer to the people around me. Even though I'm stressed and there are 600 things that need to be done at any given moment and a bunch of life-altering decisions to be made, the struggle is actually mostly internal.

I know some people will argue, "well, I can't do that," and I am sometimes one of them--I am not an ideal being and fall into traps sometimes too- but I promise you, you are capable of applying this philosophy. It takes a commitment to yourself. We have to remember we are strong, we are resilient, and we can take whatever comes our way, as long as we focus on our strategies and our abilities to tackle these issues rather than focus on the problem itself and how terrible it is. We can do this by not only telling ourselves to "think of the solution, not the problem," but by breaking things down into manageable tasks instead of focusing on everything as a whole. We can also ask for help when help is needed. Things will or will not get done regardless of how much anxiety we make ourselves feel. The key is to focus on what is within our control and let go of that which is not if we are to be our best selves.