"Contingent Performances: Between the Acts of Adjunct Faculty" MAE Alumn Erin MacKenna continued. . .

. . . It was when I was offered an internship through DePaul University and the College of Lake County that I stepped into my first college classroom as teacher. All too often, graduate students wager years of work and tens of thousands of dollars on the suspicion that they desire to teach in higher education, but few have the luxury of testing this suspicion in reality. Even fewer have the luxury of testing this suspicion for a stipend that out numbers the payment some two-year colleges offer their adjunct faculty. Properly, here resides one of my favorite lessons of graduate school: it is always more profitable to question and test reality, than it is to live it. Nonetheless, at the College of Lake County I was finally able to confirm my desire to join the ranks of higher education, not just as a student, but also as a teacher. I had come to understand the necessity of language and writing from my experiences as a graduate student and from my workshops in the shelter. Still the realization of my desire to teach writing and literature to college students did not come without anguish, anxiety, and an unexpected fear that my search for a profession was over.

A vivid dream which haunted the nights before my internship, confirmed a latent fear that my students would find me fraudulent, a ruse, a rogue, performing the part of college teacher without even the proper robes of my character. In my dream, I was forced to confront my class in my childhood pajamas, which were pink, fuzzy, and had built-in feet. As these frightful visions swallowed endless nights, this theme of fraudulence continued. The students asked me questions such as “How do barcodes work?” “Can you get all the vitamins you need from a bowl of cereal?” And “what does e pluribus Unum mean? There I stood frozen, young, no PhD, and no answers; holding not a pen, not the course text, but my beloved childhood copy of Dr. Seuss’s Oh! The Places You’ll Go. All the parts of my past which marked me as unscholarly were exhibited before the hungry eyes of suspicious students. I was afraid because I knew the immense importance of language and I was unsure as to whether or not my Master’s Degree had actually prepared me to teach College.

When I finally arrived for my first class at the College of Lake County, I forced the images of my nightmare to the margins of my mind and discovered a class full of unsuspecting students. They appeared to have no inane questions or prior expectations. And on the first day, as I stood in front of the 20 members of my class, I realized, my Master’s Degree (a mere three months from completion) had prepared me to teach, but only by teaching did I complete my education. Only by teaching did I learn how to make the course material relevant to the everyday lives of my students. Only by teaching did I learn how to handle the silence that inevitably follows some questions. Only by teaching did I learn how to write questions in a way that would make my students feel comfortable answering them. Although I no longer think of my role as professor as a performance, I must admit, I switch personas a bit as I switch campuses and classrooms. I find that every classroom is different and by respecting and nurturing the dynamic created by both instructor and students, I can more effectively build trust and security in the classroom. Just as in the shelter, it is critical to treat words carefully, for often we are in the business of breaking silences. We must remember our students are nascent in their attempts to snatch a word from its hiding place and force it under the weight of a pen into some determinate meaning before it slips back into the sea of signification. In my classrooms, I listen to the language of my students. I adopt pieces of it and weave them together with my own voice to quilt a provincial discourse of sharing, a discourse that we are equally devoted to and mutually responsible for building.

Our job, as teachers of language, is to encourage each of our student’s to find his or her own voice, not to simply mimic the voice of instructor. By demonstrating our intimacy with words, we beckon to our students to trust these slippery signifiers. As the envoys of language it is vital to treat words carefully and to adopt a dialect appropriate for each classroom. If we are not careful, we may alienate our students from language and they may never find their way down the dimly lighted corridors to self-expression.

It was knowing the way to language that allowed Walt Whitman to express man’s most luxurious statement, he wrote, “I exist as I am, that is enough. If no other in the world be aware, I sit content. If each and all be aware, I sit content.” Whitman could be content because he was able to put his love, desire, and difficulty into words. Every human soul seeks a contented existence, and as existence becomes enough our need to exercise violence falls away. But we are foolish to believe that Whitman needed “ no other in the world to be aware.” For the act of writing such a statement announces an urgent desire to escape the prospect of an entirely solitary existence. As teachers we must end our attempts to divorce contentment and expression, for their marriage is primary to our knowledge of either. Further, we diminish our role as teachers if we believe anyone learns expression in solitude; expression is learned and flourishes in a community setting.

As adjunct faculty, let us not measure our worth by our displacement across many campuses, or our lack of benefits, or the contingency of our employment. Instead, let us appraise our worth based on the significance of our task, and let us embrace the dignity that this task affords us. We are teachers of literature and language; we must swallow the air of grim silence that chokes progressive ways of expressing the self and understanding others. For if we do not, our voices are ephemeral and our beliefs, condemned to the darkest, most silent corners of the mind, will grow old and decay in our mouths never stumbling into the light of language.