I was the last to join the meeting— which was already in progress—even though I arrived 15 minutes before its purported start. Nonetheless, there were slides being slid across a giant projector screen while 25 or so of my colleagues sat at all but one of the available seats around a large conference table shaped, I thought, like Pluto’s long, frozen orbit around the sun.
I was new. I had just been hired. My appointment was for eight months, during which I would teach a 7-4 load of composition courses. If all went well, I would be unemployed for the summer but then hired back to teach a 9-6 load the next year, with—if all went well again—a slight raise.
I looked around at all the
colleagues seated around the not-quite round table. They were similar to me in
so many ways, but experience told me that I would like one or two of them,
maybe, and hate the rest.
“Excuse me, excuse me,” I said,
inching around the table, stepping over messenger bags and chunky handbags
filled with elaborate thermoses, which confused me since the conference table was
filled with such thermoses as well.
Eventually, I made my way to the
last empty chair as the slides slid and someone talked about digital scaffolding
and meeting students halfway. Halfway to what? I wondered, and sat down,
only to be met with a series of muffled, indignant screams.
“Get up! Get up! You smell like a
bus stop. Agh!” I sprung out of my seat as the colleagues gasped with a mix of
horror and frisson. Most were ostentatiously appalled at my faux pas, but some
seemed to relish this mysterious act of sacrilege.
“What the—?” I said, and tried to
escape without really leaving, since the meeting was mandatory. I began turning
in frantic circles, whipping my own messenger bag around and knocking into the
shoulders of two or three colleagues in the vicinity. They quickly arranged themselves
so as to look appalled even to theoretical spectators watching the proceedings
on soundless security footage or someone spying on the meeting through a
telescope, several mountaintops away.
“Is this someone’s chair?” I asked
to a salvo of gasps and guffaws. “If so, could you just kindly suggest that I
find another seat, even though all the other seats are taken? I should inform
you that I planned to get here early, and, you know, I actually did get
here early, only to discover that the meeting had already begun!”
“Wow. Can he really not see what
he’s done?” asked one of the colleagues, looking at me but in no way interested
in my reply.
I feared that if I confessed to not
seeing what I had done, then all was lost, so I held my tongue.
“He doesn’t see it,” said another
colleague, “and so he holds his tongue for fear of revealing his blunder.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said, turning in half
circles now, like a lawn sprinkler, as I considered crawling under or over the elliptical
table.
“Will he ever be made to see?”
wondered a third colleague.
Oh, I would see, though not for
several more insulting questions. But, eventually, I learned that I did not sit
down on just any old chair, but the Chair of the English Department.
The
Chair’s Office
“Carl?” the Chair asked, perfumed
and draped in elaborate scarves. Silver earrings quivered from the ears of a
luxurious sofa chair that was one and the same as the Chair Herself. She looked
expensive—her stock culled from rare and possibly illicit rainforest mahoganies,
bespoke brocades. She swished and clinked incessantly with each tetchy but elegant
gesture.
“Ah, Steve, actually,” I said.
“Carl Stevens?” she asked, rifling
through a file.
“Ah, no. Steve—just Steve—Klippger.”
“You would save us a lot of time,”
she confided, “If you didn’t say ahhhhhhhhhh at the beginning of every
sentence.”
“At the beginning of every sentence
that I speak, you mean?” I said, warming to the occasion.
“To what other sentences do you
think I might have referred?” she asked, swishing and clattering—her arms and
legs staggered with bracelets.
“You said I would save a lot of time
if I didn’t say ah at the beginning of every sentence. But I do not speak every
sentence. I was just pointing out—,” I said, and then stopped.
“You’re in the Composition
Department,” said the Chair, reclining—dangerously, I believed—so that her
front legs lifted off the floor.
“Yes, though the Composition
Department is not really a Department unto itself. It’s just a subset of the
English Department, which is how it was explained to me.”
“Who explained these things to you,
Steven?”
“Josh.”
“Josh has left Cooperswich
University. I’m sorry to say.” She was not sorry to say this, so far as I could
see.
“I see. And then so. Whom do I
report to?”
“To whom do you report?”
“Sure, ok.”
“Janice.”
“Ah,” I said, “So where and, ah,
whom is Janice?”
“I’m not impressed, Steven. With
what I am seeing today.”
“Hmmmumum,” I said.
“Composition is its own Department.
It has its own meetings. Joshua should have told you as much before you came,
but he didn’t. He is now in the private sector. His career wasn’t going
anywhere. He has his money now. That is all that matters. Janice is a
31-year-old recent graduate of an anonymous doctoral program that manufactures
PhDs in Writing Center and First-Year Composition Management at a rapid
rate of speed. Such programs require just three years to complete. These people
write monographs, Steven, about the rhetorical architecture of the syllabus.
Did you know that? Do you think you will like Janice?” she wondered.
“I believe so,” I said, not sure
which question I was answering, a stranger to myself and others alike.
“Janice, God help her,” the Chair
said, “will look after you.”
Janice
Janice
was not an expensive piece of furniture but, as promised, a 31-year-old woman
and a recent graduate of the Bakers University Technical Communication
Department’s Writing Center and First-Year Composition Management Program (BUTCD
WCFYCM). She was friendly, I think, and walked me a mile and a half across
campus to what looked like a derelict medical arts building.
“This looks like where I used to get
my teeth pulled when I was very young, a long, long time ago,” I said, as she
swiped us in with her Cooperswich ID card.
“This is the Richman Building. It’s
enormous, old, and mostly empty. There are hundreds of composition associates
inside.”
“Associates?”
“I prefer composition technicians,
but there are obscure guild restrictions on the use of that term in this
state.” She did not say which state we were in. I wondered if she even knew.
“Do you know what state we are in?”
“When I went to grad school, I
pictured myself managing a writing center in San Francisco or New York,” she
said wistfully.
“I, um.”
“Our offices are on the third,
fourth, and sixth floors.”
“What is on the other floors? And
why did Josh leave?”
“Josh?” she asked and led us to the
elevators.
Very well, I thought, and followed
her up to the third, fourth, and sixth floors.
The
Sixth Floor
She welcomed me into her office, which was L shaped and very small. Janice tucked herself into her minute chair-and-desk arrangement and beckoned me to sit on the office chair facing her tiny desk. The second we were both seated, she opened her laptop and began typing cacophonously.
“No one will get angry at me if I
sit on this, right?” I asked, pointing to the empty chair before me. “It’s not
the Office Manager or something, is it?” Janice smiled. I sat down quietly.
“The Chair was very unhappy,” Janice
said.
“I immediately apologized for
sitting on her, ah, seat.”
“She questioned whether you were
even Cooperswich material.”
“Ok, well…”
“She suggested that you make weekly
appointments with me to ensure you’re not negatively impacting the English
Department in any way.”
“I thought Composition was its own
department.”
“Think again.”
“Ok, but the Chair insisted—”
“Technically, yes,” she said, “but,
also, technically no.” Janice typed rapidly while staring hard, it seemed to
me, at my receding hairline.
“By the way, what is the Chair’s
name? What did she, well, do, or what was she, before, um…?”
Janice continued typing, wrinkling
an eye at my retreating hair.
“You know,” I said, looking at
Janice, “the colleagues seemed very mean to me. Have you found this to be the
case?” I hoped she might sympathize. We were both so new.
“Colleagues?” she asked, pummeling
her keyboard.
Classes
Under my contract, I was assigned
seven composition classes during the fall semester, mostly Composition and
Technological Rhetoric (C&TR) 101. My schedule was as follows: C&TR
101-2, MWF from 8:00-8:50 AM; C&TR 101-5 TFF (that is, Tuesday, Friday
(early) and Friday (late)) from 9:00-9:50 AM and 7:00-8:10 PM; C&TR 102-105,
TH from 6:00-10:00 PM; and then back to back to back to back sections of
C&TR 101 (Internet Research) MW from 10:10 AM-4:20 PM, with office hours stretching
from 9:00 AM-3:00 PM on Saturdays.
Classes were ok. Cooperswich
students come from the very best mediocre public schools and bottom quartile
private schools in the state. The Composition Program’s or Department’s
ATTENDANCE AND PARTICIPATION POLICY dictates that “students be encouraged to
attend class remotely,” even if they are physically present in the classroom,
through their tablets and phones. Cooperswich, I was told, is “Moving away
from the writing and completing assignments on personal computers model of
learning” in order to “meet students where they are,” and where they
are is on their phones. Most of my classes had 23 students. At the beginning of
class, I distributed a DLL (distance learning link) which the students joined,
via their phones and tablets. I had to remind many of them how to join these
virtual meetings despite the fact that we started every class this way. I found
this difficult to do because they would not listen to me unless they heard my
voice coming out of their phones or tablets. Once most of them had joined the
DLL, class, such as it was, began.
During the first meeting of my
C&TR 101-105 class, the Chair sat in on my class, to “observe.” She did not
join the class “remotely,” but plopped down in the middle of the front row, politely,
almost, elbowing two (occupied) desks aside, a notebook and pen resting on her
seat.
“Ok, class. Welcome to C&TR
101-105, where we—”
“May I interrupt?” asked the Chair.
“Ah, you sure did. So go ahead
again, if you must, I suppose.” She thought for a moment.
“Never mind,” she said, and scrawled
something jagged in her moleskin.
Conference
After class, we conferenced in her
office. The class she observed was either entirely normal for this particular
school and student population or an unmitigated disaster. I had not, at that
point, taught at Cooperswich long enough to know which was the case. The
students joined the DLL link but kept their cameras off. I could still see
their faces, since all of them were in the classroom, but I could not tell what
they were thinking about or actually doing on their phones and tablets. Still,
they seemed entirely too busy and pleased to be thinking about class. Only one
student, Miranda, paid attention to the lecture and answered my questions.
Miranda was wonderful.
“I noticed that a number of your
students spent a lot of time on their phones. Very few of them seemed to be
following along or contributing to discussion,” the Chair said.
“I noticed that too. It is the Composition-either-Department’s-or-Program’s
policy that students join classes remotely even if they are physically present.
Many of them have boredom disorders and some of them find eye contact repugnant,”
I said, declaiming the little I’d gleaned from a recent 90-minute C&TR training
webinar.
“There is no such policy in the
English Department, Steven,” said the Chair.
“Are we or are we not—”
“We or you, Steven?”
“In the English Department?” I
continued.
“We, Steven?”
“Yes, us,” I said, and then, “we.”
“You think that you and I—and lord
knows who else—occupy this word, usssssssss,” she hissed, “TO. GETH. ER?
Why is that? From where I’m sitting—”
“I have sat where you’re sitting,” I
reminded her, “though, admittedly, I’m not sure what this proves,” I faltered.
“I see,” she said, trembling with
indignation.
“I was told to interact with the
students exclusively through the DLL. That way, they are calm and subdued, and
the, well, the Composition Part of the English Department or Composition
Department that is separate from the English Department can then record all of
our classes and later study them. For, I guess, assessment purposes.”
“Tell your students to wake up,
Steven,” she said. “And I advise you to do the same.”
Finals
Finals were an abomination. The
students used an application called Out~Source (I later learned) to find,
summarize, quote, and synthesize materials from assigned readings into
competent but eerily impersonal prose that was always technically flawless if
slightly or significantly adjacent to the relevant assignment. I gave everyone
a B- since I couldn’t say for sure that they were cheating but, with mandatory
participation points, per the Composition Program’s or Department’s guidelines,
even for those who were incessantly absent, they all got a B+.
Except Miranda. Miranda got an A+. She composed her own essays and examination responses in insightful if world-weary prose. She made certain mistakes, dependably, (such as using a semi-colon to introduce a quotation after an independent clause) that showed she was a human and not some sleepwalking algorithm, immune to death and nuance alike. Miranda was at once fascinated and disgusted by all that we read, all that we discussed. The other students did not notice her. When she spoke, she lowered her phone. She nodded along with my soliloquies.
I typed A+ as many times as I could
onto her essay and promised her that I would nominate her for some kind of award,
once I discovered what awards they awarded at Cooperswich University.
The
Colleagues
Another meeting was afoot, this one “SOLEY”
for members “THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT,” as I’d been reminded in an email. Exactly,
ah, whom that included or excluded was uncertain. I barged in gently and cleared
my throat.
“Um, hello.” The colleagues glinted
at me with their glasses, laptops, and thermoses. I had not, if I’m being
honest, thought very far beyond this point.
“Quick, someone push the Chair under
the conference table,” said a colleague loudly. “We must protect her.”
“Yes, here comes the oaf who shakes
hands with his butt,” said another.
“Now that you’ve learned your
lesson,” said a third, “don’t you feel ashamed to show yourself to those you
learned your lesson in front of?”
“In front of those from whom you
learned your lesson?” intoned the Chair.
“I had a good student this semester.
Just one. Out of a cast of hundreds, all wastrels. She must be rewarded. I’ve
come to ask about awards for great students,” I said.
The Chair flipped a scarf over her
crest rail and angled toward me.
“Want an award for your protege?”
she asked. “Tell her to take a real class. In the English Department.” Chuckles
all around.
“I looked it up,” I said. “There’s
an encrypted file deep on the Registrar’s intranet that says that Composition
is actually part of the English Department. Don’t ask how I obtained this
information,” Miranda accessed it for me, of course, with snide ease, “but I
have the printouts. I have proof!” I waved the printed intranet pages around
for all to see.
“Give me those!” said the Chair.
“Oh, shit,” I said, as the Chair
levitated and swirled around in the air, disposing herself finally as though
she were held aloft by a hostile party who planned on bludgeoning a foe. “I’ll
give you your award,” she said
“Oh, Jesus,” I said, beating a hasty
retreat. The colleagues were rapt and terrified. They quavered but wanted
blood.
“Wanna know what happened to Josh?”
the Chair asked, in a winded snarl, “I’ll show you what happened to Josh!”
I fled, screaming.
The Chair chased me out of the
conference room, down the stairs, out of the Bigman building, home of the
English Department. (Well, part of it, anyway. The Literature Department, you
might say, though it wasn’t quite that either.) I looked back and saw her
scarves and earrings trailing behind her as she screeched in my direction.
“I’ll give you,” she gasped, “your
award!”
We ran out onto the common. It was a
cold day in December. Breath steamed from my plump red face and from the
Chair’s luxurious seat.
“We’re dying,” she said. “There are
fewer colleagues every year. They all leave for non-profits and banks!” she
gasped. “Fewer than ever are choosing our path. And, yet, we are inundated with
Writing Center Managers! With cut-rate rhetors, like yourself!”
“Um, where’s Josh?” I said, hiding
behind a lonely dogwood tree.
“Where he belongs,” she said. “Come
‘mere, you shit!” and she flipped around in the air as though once again hoisted
by a prospective bludgeoner. “You smell like a Salvation Army, you know that?”
she wheezed, attempting to strike me. Somehow, I dodged the blow and ran away,
keeping the tree always between us. Enraged, she struck at me again and smashed
herself to bits against the tree.
Miranda
Miranda thanked me for my effusive
praise and made-up award, which I simply called the Actually Really Good Award,
which I typed in 72-point Rockwell font and printed out on a sheet of
Cooperswich letterhead. A few weeks later, per her request, I wrote her a
glowing recommendation letter, and, in the spring, she transferred to
Pepperdine.
The
Chair
The Chair was repaired in short
order and given a generous buyout by the administration. Days later, Josh was
spotted in the woods at the edge of campus, dressed in crude leathers and furs,
though he retreated when some colleagues approached him. He seemed frightened
of people and averse to daylight. A new Chair was brought in to replace the old.
He refused to admit compositional laborers to the English Department proper,
though he still made us come to all the meetings. He was a plain red office
chair, corporate in appearance, and he said he had big plans to modernize the
Department. During the first meeting with all of us together, I pretended not
to know who or what he was, and I sat on him.