I admit, details are not necessarily my biggest passion. Don't get me wrong, I can obsess over the tiniest detail in my barbie-doll nativities, or spend hours working out how to best slide pie dough into a pan. But those aren't details as much as they are God's little way of getting me to hang around for another five minutes. I hate Details, with a capital D, which rhymes with B and that stands for Boredom. I despise the stuff you find in very small print on acid-free paper. I hate paperwork, go blind when I sit down to fill out forms and stroke out when someone passes me a "handbook." Things like health insurance manuals and union rulebooks have no purchase for me until the moment I need to know the information. But usually by that time I have junked said manual in order to get the bad ju-ju out of my house.
So I once again find myself in this situation. I'm not sure I've actually tossed the manual I need this time, since all my stuff is packed up in storage right now. But I most likely have already thrown it out in some fit of pique. It would be the handbook for the community college where I currently work, if you want to call it working. I consider it more an interesting experiment in masochism.
I'm not even sure what handbook I should be looking for, or what I'm actually looking for. Considering I have never really spent a whole lot of time looking at these kinds of handbooks, I can't necessarily figure out how to find something or judge the quality of organization. But I can say the few manuals I've dared open for five minutes before I started bleeding out the ears would have made the Marquis de Sade blush at the exquisitely cruel manner in which the information was assembled.
Although I consider myself a slight dabbler in foreign languages, I have never been able to wrap my head around Academic Bureaucratese, a language known for its protean grammar and bandersnatchy verbiage. A.B is a language quite like Esperanto--everyone could and should learn it, but why on Earth would anyone in their right mind devote one spare nanosecond of time to it? I wonder if people who learn Klingon also have a talent for A.B. They're probably distant relatives to the Vogons.
But back to the manual, the one I don't know if I should be reading or not because I don't know if it has the information I want or if my precious information is hiding in another manual, which I'll have to go to Middle Earth to retrieve. I'm looking for a term called "modal load." This little three-syllable set seems to pack quite a wallop, since this is what's supposedly preventing me from teaching two classes in the English Department next semester, rather than teaching one class and working in a lab.
Working in the lab, under normal circumstances, would not be such a big issue, even though I receive about $300 less a month. But since I have been plunked down in a lab that seems to sit in a very small version of South Central, I'd prefer to find my way back to the classrooms on the main campus, as most people in our department who are of sound mind and body would. Part-time lecturers lost classes this past semester, due to the budget cuts, i.e., massive cash hemorrhaging that took place because of a ridiculous series of Trustees' mismanagement that was then compounded by the failing economy. So instead of teaching my usual 2 classes, I got one class and a complementary number of hours working in the "Writing Lab." The Writing Lab at South Central Jr. is more a repository for juvenile delinquents and people who wander in from the street looking for a place to check their MySpace page. People get very little writing done there. I can't get anything done there because I'm too busy telling people to stop talking about their girlfriends or their baby's daddy at full volume on their cell phones.
So I get paid less, work 3 times as many hours, and wonder if anyone is breaking into my car while I sit in a lab that hardly anyone ever comes to in order to do something the lab was actually designed for.
So when I saw an e-mail from the chair telling all faculty that a number of classes for next semester remained unstaffed and asking if anyone was interested in teaching them, I happily rejoined with "I would be very interested in taking the MWF 2-3 p.m. class," which translates into F*** Yeah!" Who wouldn't want to get back to teaching, recover the $300 a month and spend less time sitting indoors with a bunch of computers? If it were a boyfriend with a bad attitude and a nifty haircut, I could see it, but there was nothing remotely attractive or sexually gratifying about the lab gig.
But I get this e-mail back, addressed this time to "Part-time Faculty." The chair tell us that she received many e-mails from part-timers but she could not give them the classes, because, since we're at .25 a class, that would push us past our limit. So, in order to meet "modal load" for the adjunct lecturers, she would have to give us one class and "complement" the class with lab hours.
"I hope this is clear," she wrote at the end of the e-mail. I don't think that needs translation...
I wanted to write back and say, "The next time you send out an invitation for classes, but you actually don't want the part-timer's to write back, maybe you shouldn't include them on the list in the first place." Actually, I wanted to write back and say, "Eat shit and die." But that wouldn't have gone down well, either. So instead, I'm blogging.
What kills me about this whole thing is overload is overload. Whether full-timers take the classes or part-timers take the classes, the English Department is still going to end up spending more money. Why give people who already have a fixed salary more money when part-timers are struggling to make ends meet right now?
But even better than giving the extra work to the full-timers is which full-timers get the classes. Our chair was kind enough to send all the faculty the names of the instructors who'd be teaching the overload classes. One of them is clueless. I just heard from a couple of other students about how insensitive another one is. Two of the people on the list are having an affair in front of God and everyone, and another person is an outright racist. The cliche came to mind when I read the list: There is no justice.
What the hell is modal load and how can I get it off my back? I'm too busy trying to keep up with my classes to protest the fact that I'm getting screwed over by a bureaucracy that could give a flying flip about me. The three hours I need to sit down and read the manuals until I find what I'm looking for are usually being consumed by lesson preparation, paper grading, driving, and dodging bullets at the lab. And I know that when I look up modal load, it's going to lead me to the next ten things I have to look up in order to understand anything. Just as the poor are too busy being poor to be interested in elections, I am too buried under one mountain of papers to develop any interest in another mountain of papers.
But it has become a pie crust slipping into a plate now. If I'm going to bitch, I'm going to get it right, down to the last detail.
After minutes of searching, I discover that the 117-page handbook for faculty covers "modal load" in one paragraph: "The sum of instructional and non-instructional assignments shall not exceed 60% of the hours per week considered a full-time assignment for regular employees having comparable duties." Although the term "modal load" seems to appear nowhere in this handbook, I think this is what it comes down to: %60. This still makes no sense to me, as 2 classes at .25 still equals only 50%. Perhaps I have smoked too much crack, but something does not seem kosher. Of course, I'm sure it's far more complicated than my pretty little head can handle. I'm sure it's just as complicated as when Kaiser was taking health insurance premiums for me from two different state institutions but I couldn't get unemployment insurance when I desperately needed it last year. The state can pay my health insurance premiums twice over but can't help me put food on my table. What, the computer systems don't tell you when you're doing the same thing twice? Even my Microsoft Word can do that.
"You already have this file. Would you like to replace it with this new file?"
Modal load, it seems, is the load that gets dumped on you when you're an adjunct. Modal load is the "stay right where you are and come no closer." Modal load is the rock tied round your foot so that you sink faster when they dump you into the river, if they don't sell you up it first. Modal load is the wall my boss gets to hide behind right now, while I get to hide behind my computer screen at the lab, wondering how long I have to stay in South Central Jr.
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