Like I Needed Another Reason to Quit This Job

I've already decided to blow off teaching after this semester. If not forever, at least for awhile. It is not a decision that came easy, as you know if you've read this blog for a few weeks.

The pangs of doubt start revving up sometimes. Like today after class when my favorite student of the semester hung around to talk to me. She's effervescently smart, invested in learning, funny, and she wants to go to law school. Why? Because she is fascinated with the Constitution and wants to devote her professional life to studying it. We spent some time talking about the lunatic crap spewed out by Ahmadinejad. She knew who he was. She was one of 2 in the class who did. It's hard to convey how much I appreciate this girl, the proud, confident owner of a living, vital intellect among a majority of students who are happy to function academically with all the vim and vigor of the bulb in an Easy Bake Oven.

Today this girl told me she's really glad I came here from the midwest and wanted to know what I was teaching next semester so she could sign up. I told her I didn't know. (Although most likely I'll be teaching myself which halter top to wear as I wash the windshields of cars stopped at downtown Phoenix stoplights.)

So yeah, there are moments when I see the things I'll miss.

Which brings me to this: I miss my old job so much that I start to get a twitch in my face just thinking about it. Not only were the classes great, the co-workers, etc. etc. But the (much higher) salary included benefits. Outstanding benefits. For a monthly $35 deduction from my paycheck, I got big fat HMO coverage with $15 copays for doctor visits. My prescriptions were $10. My eye exams were free. And the dental coverage was 80%.

Contrast that to the community college where I presently work. There are no health benefits offered to adjuncts. A colleague, Cindy, who is a "full" faculty member there filled me in on some other things. I was feeling head-spinningly sick today from some bug I've been halfway in and out of for two weeks. It hit with a fury in the middle of my 7:30 a.m. class so I let them go way early. (Weeping and gnashing of teeth all around.) I was trying to decide whether or not to go home or to stick it out until my 1:30 class. Usually the 4 hours in between those classes are my time to grade papers, prepare lectures, eat, play on the computer. But my innards were coiling and writhing and taking on muffled voices that sounded high-pitched and frantic like Miss Jane Hathaway of The Beverly Hillbillies. As my mom sometimes says "I didn't know whether to shit or go blind."

I walked to Cindy's office to ask her if she remembered the policy about sick days for adjunct professors like me. I hadn't bothered to read the dull, lengthy adjunct handbook, and she used to be an adjunct herself. She rolled her eyes. "Ha!" she said, and told me that no matter why you're absent from a class, the college will not pay you. They deduct the pay for that class session from your already feeble paycheck. She went on to say that during her first year of "adjuncting" at this college, she got cancer. She had to be away from work for two weeks after her surgery to remove a tumor. The English Department, she said, kindly delivered to her a pile of student papers to grade. But they did not pay her for those two weeks.

When she told me this, I stood looking at her as though she'd just admitted to having been held down and sexually assaulted by a goldfish. The story was too impossible. But true.

So even though a few hours later I had the nice conversation with the student, I had already tied bricks to the feet of the tiny chance that I might work here another semester, and tossed it into the deep end of Satan's toilet. I am infuriated with this pathetic excuse for a "college." For all their talk of helping people and their printed brochures proclaiming themselves the best/most diverse/highest ranked/warmest/most altruistic and magical community college system in the country, they can't bring their sorry asses to pay for 2 weeks off for cancer surgery. Surgery that was paid for by an expensive ill-afforded insurance policy bought through an independent agent.

To this overgrown, selfish high school with the solid block of ice where its heart should be (hard to pull off in the middle of a desert) I say, I already despised you, but now, karmically, I believe you have purchased yourself an eternity of honking on hot donkey schlong.

10 more weeks of classes to go.