We’ve started a new semester.

What more is there to say about that? I’ve lost two of my four classes, which is not unheard of in Adjunctland. In fact, it is actually pretty common. What is unheard of is to work at one campus where you have pretty consistent course loads over a four year period.

To be fair, I wasn’t the only one who suffered. Many did, full timers as well as adjuncts. Still, it has really brought me up short and caused a bit of pondering on my part.

For instance, there is the problem with regard to my training. My academic emphasis in grad school was Ancient History, British History, a bit of the Black Death and some Gender Studies work. All of which qualify me as an instructor of Western Civilization. Technically, it should also qualify me as an instructor of American History at the survey level but there are those who feel otherwise. It doesn’t hurt me now as an adjunct but it probably will hurt me when a full time slot opens up.

The solutions to the problem are the same now as they were ten years ago

1. Quit teaching. Just give up on it and go do something else.
2. Go get the 12 hours of American History. The cost of which will be about $4000 plus and consume a year of my time.
3. Move out of the Kansas City Area and try to find someplace where they don’t care about the 12 hour deficit. Which won’t matter because most places hire PhD’s due to the fact that, well, there is a glut of historians out there.

Now, I was warned repeatedly that getting a job as an historian would be hard. However, I’d been told that many things I wanted to were hard. It is hard to get through college and earn a degree. It is hard to go to war and survive it. It is nearly impossible to get published as a writer of any kind of fiction.

I accomplished all of those hard things. We’re they hard? Yes. Did some of them take longer than I thought they would? Sure, especially getting pubished.

Becoming an instructor of history, on the other hand? Just becoming an adjunct was difficult due to the bit about the twelve hours of American History. I’m not even sure how that rationalization makes any sense at all. American History and European History are tied in at the core level. In American History One for the first few weeks, one basically gives a somewhat watered down series of Western Civ Two lectures. How can one argue that a European Historian isn’t qualified to do that job?

So lately, I find myself wishing I had asked for some qualification on what was meant by hard. Did folks mean hard as in, “It is like trying to open a jar of olives?” Or did they mean hard as in, “You must build your own warp drive from balsa wood and fly to Alpha Centauri?”

I think I might have picked something else if I had known it was the later.

So it goes.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
Kansas City, Missouri

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