My next job is ‘where’ I became, irrevocably, an adjunct. But I wasn’t ‘there’ there. I was hired to teach asynchronous online courses. I had set foot on campus a few times in the past, but I never saw it during the five years I taught there.

’There’ was really D2L, Outlook, my web browser. The cloud. Educationally speaking, I considered this institutional malpractice: my first semester, I was expected to spontaneously adapt whatever face-to-face classroom pedagogy I had to the apparatus of the discussion board, the PDF file, and the blind-CCed group email, with negligible technical assistance and zero preparation time.

This was normal and still is; most faculty who had to adapt in haste for pandemic teaching several years ago got a sharp taste of it. And this was before everyone zoomed. It’s not that I had no resources to fall back on; I had been using the internet, even living on it, longer than my students had been alive. But the fact remains teaching in a room is not the same as teaching in a web browser, especially for students still maturing academically.

Serious institutions would build supportive training for their teaching staffs to do their best work under these conditions, reflecting the precarious reality of the labor market for adjunct teaching, with its high turnover and weak institutional ties.

Instead, my radical isolation mirrored that of my students. Looking back now, I find a note from one, whom I’d reached out to in order to get a missing paper. Most professors wouldn’t even go to the trouble, he says. I received a lot of similar notes, tokens of gratitude for routine teaching work from students utterly deprived of attention from their professors.

Teachers like to say how much they learn by teaching, but in my experience asynchronous online teaching was especially bereft of those sorts of lessons, which must only come from a genuine act of teaching, as a product of actual, undeferred interaction. Although once, a student went to Walden Pond on spring break, and brought back pictures of Thoreau’s pond for us.

The next one-semester stint, cut short by a five million dollar budget shortfall, was my introduction to abandonment. After a shorter, slightly less crushing interlude of unemployment, I lucked into some logic and critical thinking courses at a community college. Two courses got me paid at the rate my colleagues enjoyed, with bumps for credentials and experience. A friend hired the same semester to do only a single course was less lucky—anything under the two-course minimum was paid at scale. That sort of cost-cutting corporate management ethos infused the place.

As the semester began, a colleague warned me—I couldn’t expect to complete a standard logic course with these students, so I should halve the syllabus, just propositional logic, no predicate logic. This turned out to be accurate, not because the students couldn’t handle the material, but because the requisite pace couldn’t be sustained. It was a large class, two or three times bigger than the best size.

There were typical students, nontraditional students, working mothers, recovered addicts, students with criminal records. They had a lot going on. There were students as able as any I’ve had in logic, but there were also students with pronounced learning disabilities. Everyone could learn how to do a deduction but some needed more time and care to get there—and I couldn’t just run them all through it and consign stragglers to the bottom of the grade distribution.

So we took more time. As much time as I would give, there would be someone eager to use it. This was a real difference from typical student attitudes at most other schools I’ve taught at, up or down the scale, where calculated disengagement has prevailed (in service courses, most naturally).

Another problem: word was that local university faculty were now rejecting our logic course for transfer credit because its content fell short. Somewhat unfair, we thought. So when it was over, I taught the students who were planning to transfer, not coincidentally also the best students, how to finesse the system: read a little more about predicates and relations, do a few problems, and if anyone asks, give them the (complete rather than revised) syllabus.

When my friend and I were cut loose at the end of the semester—that five million dollar shortfall—he had seen enough; he went back to teaching high school, his career before the Ph.D. Higher ed’s loss. I think I would probably be happier now if I had gotten the same message he did, that there’s no place for teachers in this job.

After a crushing interlude of unemployment subsequent to my first teaching job, I was fortunate to pick up some courses for my old department, giving an intro course I had refined repeatedly and a moral problems course I was not at all prepared to teach.

People often have the mistaken idea that, when teachers themselves go to school to become teachers, they are taught everything they know, and then go on to re-teach it to their own students. But there is often a deep gap between the things faculty in higher education cover in school, and the things they are expected to cover to make a living. In reality the work, especially early-career work, is a constant struggle to create and refine the courses and their materials, starting from almost nothing.

These were larger than any courses I’d taught before, or since, and I found that the format pushed me to lecture more like a lecturer. I’ve never liked to be observed while I teach, but during these courses I also had five different TAs—another first—and I learned from them how to trust the presence of an appreciative ear, one that could hear more than a student would understand just then.

This was where I first started to teach Thoreau; I tried to learn something about how to do it from his insistence that ‘the volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement’. There’s a way to tease out an astonishing implication from that if you lecture a little bit about spirit and speech and breath and evaporation and the etymology of ‘volatile’. Once when I did it, I actually saw a student in the back of the lecture hall open his mouth in astonishment.

It was a great stroke of luck to land my first position immediately upon graduating with my doctorate, at a small liberal arts college, even though it was ‘only’ a what academics classify as a ‘visiting’ position (one year, temporary). Now, almost fifteen years later, it seems idyllic. Nowhere else have I been as welcomed as a colleague; nowhere else was there such collective enthusiasm among students for philosophy, indeed for college in general.

Having seen many years of students since, I have learned to connect this to the just-recent financial crisis; the group at this school didn’t yet know the crushing anxieties that would set in in higher education, and could still manage to approach their college experience in some spirit of exploration and experimentation.

One of my students went on to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy; her career is now better than mine. It is bittersweet when she tells me: your ancient philosophy class was what made me think I could become a philosopher.

'… when we’re able to maintain a practice, day after day, week after week, then we can make progress, even if it’s in very small increments.'

Musil's writer's block

Amateur

Rocks.

In big piles.

Of rocks.

'We haven't invented the Hula-Hoop or anything. We're only contemporary. And if we're different from the rest of TV, it's because the rest of TV isn't even contemporary.'