The Reader is dead, long live the Reader!
Remember, back when I quit the teaching job on the grounds that I didn't want to teach the required reader? Well, it was more of a thing than I really indicated back then. Other and I had gone to the Dept. Chair to protest the reader becoming mandatory, as we had created our own new (and highly successful, based on four sections of the course) curriculum. He'd said, well, you can still request to be excused from the rule - write a letter to the Composition Chair and explain why you don't want to use it. She'll be reasonable.
So I did, and she turned down my request on the basis that three (out of thirty or so) of the articles that I planned to use in my class were also in the reader, so I could build my course around those. She also said, seizing on my mention of my use of group work in my classes that there was an article about group work in the reader that I could also use.
I wanted to talk about the beauty and power of language to express complex ideas and emotions, and she wanted me to talk about how neat group work is.
Another important piece of information here is that I had used an earlier version of the reader my first year of teaching composition, and it was fucking horrible.
So, I quit. E-mailed the guy who does scheduling, copied the Dept. Chair and quit.
Then earlier this month I graduated and everything, and I've been looking for a full-time job for the last couple weeks. And yesterday, the guy who does scheduling phones me up and offers me a job teaching a literature survey. The same one other (a third-year PhD student) is teaching. Classes started last Tuesday, but this professor up and left, leaving several classes needing to be filled immediately.
Whee! I took it, and am now looking for part-time work to supplement the meager pay that teaching a single class will bring in. Yesterday was crazy, getting back into the university's system, twisting arms for a parking pass, reworking the syllabus which had originally called for the students to read 8 novels (some of them quite long), three plays, and a variety of poems in 15 weeks. Luckily the first novel they read was Invisible Man, which I am all over. I had my first class this morning, and it went well.
Remember, back when I quit the teaching job on the grounds that I didn't want to teach the required reader? Well, it was more of a thing than I really indicated back then. Other and I had gone to the Dept. Chair to protest the reader becoming mandatory, as we had created our own new (and highly successful, based on four sections of the course) curriculum. He'd said, well, you can still request to be excused from the rule - write a letter to the Composition Chair and explain why you don't want to use it. She'll be reasonable.
So I did, and she turned down my request on the basis that three (out of thirty or so) of the articles that I planned to use in my class were also in the reader, so I could build my course around those. She also said, seizing on my mention of my use of group work in my classes that there was an article about group work in the reader that I could also use.
I wanted to talk about the beauty and power of language to express complex ideas and emotions, and she wanted me to talk about how neat group work is.
Another important piece of information here is that I had used an earlier version of the reader my first year of teaching composition, and it was fucking horrible.
So, I quit. E-mailed the guy who does scheduling, copied the Dept. Chair and quit.
Then earlier this month I graduated and everything, and I've been looking for a full-time job for the last couple weeks. And yesterday, the guy who does scheduling phones me up and offers me a job teaching a literature survey. The same one other (a third-year PhD student) is teaching. Classes started last Tuesday, but this professor up and left, leaving several classes needing to be filled immediately.
Whee! I took it, and am now looking for part-time work to supplement the meager pay that teaching a single class will bring in. Yesterday was crazy, getting back into the university's system, twisting arms for a parking pass, reworking the syllabus which had originally called for the students to read 8 novels (some of them quite long), three plays, and a variety of poems in 15 weeks. Luckily the first novel they read was Invisible Man, which I am all over. I had my first class this morning, and it went well.
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