Yesterday was the first day of class. Having spent the previous two weeks frantically working to get my syllabi done in time to make copies while I was on campus for the "mandatory adjunct meeting," I've been taking it pretty easy this week. Then yesterday came the baptism by fire. I exaggerate. It was rather a grueling day, though, since I had to talk pretty much non-stop from 10am until 2pm. That's the bad thing about the first day of class&mdash;the teacher has to do it all. As I told my students, if things go the way I'd like, that's the last time I'll be doing all, or even most, of the talking during any given class period.

It's been a while since I taught on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule, and I've never done it with three classes back-to-back. It will be interesting to see whether I'm able to fill up an hour and fifteen minutes twice a week. I've always found the fifty minute period too short to do much of anything. The good thing about the longer class period is that you can break each class meeting up into a couple of activities (or more)&mdash; you can do this in theory, anyway. 

Last Friday was the "mandatory adjunct meeting," which serves as an orientation for new part-time instructors and, well, I'm not sure what function it serves for returning adjuncts. There were four presentations by members of the Writing Program Committee, and two of them were nearly exactly the same as presentations given last year. Yawn. The main thing I came away with was this shocking (to me) piece of information: At this "college" (soon to be "university"), the ratio of full-time to part-time teachers is 40/60. Yes, 60% of the people teaching there are part-time instructors. The prof who reported this explained that the school administration finds this ratio acceptable, even desirable. This disturbs me on so many levels.

First, for the tuition these students are paying, they deserve to have MOSTLY teachers whose primary job is to teach them&mdash;people who are not struggling to make ends meet by teaching seven classes at three different schools; people who do not try to fit their instructional duties into the time left over after their full-time jobs. College students deserve to have teachers with offices&mdash;some of my most significant educational exchanges, as an undergrad and as a grad student, came not in the classroom but in conversations I had with professors in their offices. That's the sort of interaction that part-time instructors&mdash;at least at this school and in this department&mdash;can't offer. 

Second, I would venture to say that many of the part-time instructors here are barely qualified at best. I say this because I haven't seen nearly the rigorous criteria applied to instructors' educational qualifications here as I have at other schools. A woman who was teaching in the English department last year also taught a philosophy course, and she had not even a bachelor's degree in philosophy, never mind "30 hours of graduate credit" (which was, I thought, the minimum standard for teaching any subject at the college level).

It's discouraging to think that as a college degree becomes increasingly a "required" qualification, it becomes, for so many people, less and less valuable in any meaningful sense. Education has become just another commodity for which it's not quality that matters but the number of "units" that can be moved. I live in hell.