I retired from fulltime teaching four years ago, and I've never regretted it. But I still love to teach, and I've stayed with it part-time. Fortunately I left my university in good standing, so I've gotten invited back nearly each semester to pick up a class or two. Some of my colleagues have suggested I come back full time; flattering, I tell them, but no thanks. I might miss the classes and conversation, but I wouldn't miss the meetings, paperwork, and reports that are an increasing part of every teacher's job today.
After lunch today I found a big, deep-cushioned armchair across from a glass wall and sat down to jot down some ideas. It wasn't till someone went through the glass doors in that wall that I heard a familiar sound from the past: the entire fulltime faculty was meeting on the other side of the glass in a large conference room, and as the door swung open, I heard an administrator giving a report.
As I peered through the opened vertical blinds behind the glass, I recogized many of my former colleagues, dutifully listening to the speaker, and for the first time my retirement really hit home to me. They were in there and I was out here. We both did the same thing, but they made probably about ten times more salary than I did for the same work, because in addition to the teaching, they had to attend meetings, advise students, and do reports and tasks that I, as a part-timer, no longer had to do.
It made me think. I could have been in there with them, on the other side of that glass wall, as I had been every year at one college or another for thirty-five years, as a professor, department chair, division chair and finally dean, for seven of them. But did I miss it? No, not a bit. Not the meetings and other tasks outside the classroom, and certainly not the committees and reports, phoning and planning problems resolution. I realized how much I love ideas and respect learning, love to teach, but do not love to practise the professional responsibilities of a fulltimer, and I was, and still am, happy to be on the outside looking in.
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3 comments:
Boy, did you nail it. I'm a part-time instructor, and I would never, ever want to be full-time. I've been at this job for so long, many people ask me why I don't apply when a full-time position comes open. If I ever did, the interviewing process would just be for show; I could just waltz into the job.
But I don't want to be full-time. If I were experiencing a cash crunch and needed more income, the college where I teach will allow a part-timer to teach as many as five courses during a term, provided it's not for more than two terms in a row. And being a full-timer really does carry more responsibility than I'd like to deal with -- paperwork and meetings and a whole lot of other bother.
As a part-timer, I can choose my level of participation. I can attend meetings I care about, such as those involving textbook selection and curriculum development for the courses I teach. But I can blow off the silly beginning-of-term "let's all get excited" meeting, and other meetings that don't mean anything to me.
A couple of years back, the college negotiated a deal with the union that would allow part-timers to get paid for attending the "let's get excited" meeting. But I still don't go. I would have to get paid a lot more than $44 to endure that.
Good to hear that another feels as I do. It's ironic, isn't it, that part-time teaching feels more empowering than fulltime does. It's also sad that the profession has stripped so much control from the teacher, supplanted it with suffocating accountability tasks and prescribed behaviors. It wasn't that way when I began.
Meetings that are worthwhile: textbook selection, curriculum planning, end-of-term panel grading.
Meetings that are not worthwhile: all others, especially those that are really pep rallies.
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