"Adequate Progress"

I'm tired, sweaty, angry, and my back is sore. This is because, after finally buffing up and posting the posts that had been festering in my draft queue, I attacked the day's official task: applying for a position at Big Midwestern University.

It's nothing fancy, nor overly lucrative: some kind of low-level composition coordinator. This means a little more money, one fewer class, and the joy of organizing and running the new-teacher orientation.

Because I applied THREE TIMES to teach in this summer program, before they finally accepted me because by that point they had to, but because the summer before that it was a CRIME I didn't get accepted everyone said, a CRIME, only before I knew I didn't there were all these weeks and weeks and weeks of nervous anticipation because by that point I had all the qualifications they were looking for... anyway, I have bad feelings about applying for things at BMU.

Even though I made a point of not getting worked up about it this weekend, and didn't even agree to begin working on it today until after I'd finished the other tasks I'd set out for myself (GO ME! PRIORITIES!) and even though by this time I've (usually unsuccessfully) applied to so many academic positions that I have plenty of files from which to crib a Reflective Teaching Statement... 4 o'clock still found me hunched over several three-ring binders on the floor, yoga-posture-mindfulness kicked to the curb, swearing at the computer for taking so long to load cds when I needed to find this old file, like, now. The voices in my head were going IT'S STUPID TO HAVE FOUR SYLLABI BUT ONLY ONE FROM BMU and the other voices were going YES BUT THESE ARE THE MOST RECENT and still other voices were going SHIT, WHERE ARE THE EVALUATIONS FOR THIS CLASS? IT'S STUPID TO PUT IN A CLASS BUT NOT PUT IN THE EVALUATIONS FOR IT and other voices were going WHISKEY, STAT. Then I thought the papers, though all neatly holepunched, looked kind of messy when they were all in the binder. Then I thought that it was a breach of etiquette to fail to have written up a description of each section. Also, that it looked stupid that I couldn't find all the assignment sheets, so I just put in whichever ones I had. Really no rhyme or reason. And that I couldn't find the thing I'd written up that explains why my design for that one class was ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT, thought I did pack too much reading into it, but I'd learned from the experience. Plus some of those syllabi till had typos. And some had tiny font. And some had goofy little pictures. And I spilled on one of them.

Then CV (needs. new. acronym.) drove me to campus and I turned it in and then came home. I'm wearing exactly what I wore to the dogpark this morning: tanktop I slept in, stained pants, unshowered, haven't touched my hair. This tells you something about my current relationship with campus.

I did, however, put on a bra. A nice rounded one, which is to say padded, which is to say no chance you can see my nipples. This also tells you something about my relationship with campus.

I'll say it: I have immense confidence -- some would say FOOLHARDY confidence -- in my ability to do certain things. Cook delicious dinner, even if the odd EXPERIMENT turns out wrong. Not everything I write is good or interesting, but I can write those ways sometimes. I can jog three miles. I believe that, if I had time to commit to training, I could run a marathon. I suppose I even believe that I can teach, if only because of the sheer miracle that every time I'm supposed to do it, it appears to happen in that the end of class always successfully arrives.

But I don't believe I can sell myself to the BMU department. A part of me, in the context of BMU, is still twenty-two, skinny as all hell, in a major war with my roommates, and pissed off. And, as so often accompanies, defensive. My first comp class and evaluations sucked monkey balls. Workshop wasn't taking to my writing in the way that I had hoped. Everyone seemed to think I had to "finish stories." I hated teaching anything that wasn't creative writing, because I wasn't very good at it. Or because my students didn't really listen to me because I was a skinny pissed-off twenty-two-old, with a nervous giggle and hair like a cocker spaniel , and these were were angry, meathead eighteen-year-olds, more interested in being schooled in the intricacies of the beer bong than in the intricacies of the thesis statement. And I didn't really blame them. I was pissed off I was teaching this stupid-ass, hard-as-hell curriculum (6 papers! With drafts!) I didn't understand, which took FOREVER to do and grade for and I wasn't getting any writing done and in spite of it taking forever I always also felt guilty for not doing it as good as I should be doing it, for example as good as my roommate I totally hated. AND FOR ALL OF THIS, I BLAMED BMU, the bitchgoddess who lured me here with her siren song of "more reputable program" and "better opportunities," then left me to wallow in my own dispensability!

So there's still a hint of a feeling of defensiveness. Is it leftover? Or is this a new defensiveness, that just seems like an extension of the old one because there was never a time of not-feeling-defensive-ness, that is to say never a break. Making them seem like both part of one long defensiveness.

For instance. We were at a baby shower the other week. Unrelatedly, at this baby shower there were no fewer than THREE enormous pregnant women, plus one woman with a 3 month old baby. Then there were a bunch of unpregnant women, and we sort of congregated by ourselves for awhile, as if we needed to protect ourselves. From the Baby Rays: they seemed so tangible. And CATCHING.

The mother-to-be whose shower it was had invited her advisor, a tall and dramatic woman who talked at length about how embarrassed she was by her fellow academics at a recent conference held in I've-forgotten-what-Caribbean-locale, fellow academics who wore BLACK LEATHER! on THE BEACH! Not even trying to blend in!

So someone got around to relating that I hadn't gotten teaching this semester. YES. MY VERY FIRST SEMESTER OFF CONTRACT, A CONTRACT I MYSELF SUPPLEMENTED BY TAKING WORK ELSEWHERE, the department didn't have any courses to offer me, with the Enrollment Crisis and all. All the faculty are so shocked to hear this. "Faculty never hear these things!" my advisor said to me when she met me downtown to "strategize," which turned out to mean sip coffee and chat. (Also, she said all the things a mentor would say in your fantasy, but that you hardly see in reality.)

So Dramatic Advisor, who was also being sympathetic, said to me at this baby shower, "And you're making adequate progress?"

Though I said something affirmative, in reality this question touches off some defensiveness, old or new I can't quite say.

Adequate progress? In the eight years I've lived here, I've earned an MFA and an MA, have completed all coursework for the PHD*, have turned out one hell of a reading list and well, hm, some preliminary versions of an exam proposal. About which my advisor said someone said, "You're lucky to have a student working on that."

Took me a few years to come up with the focus, but I have it now, and it's good. Pretty good.

Also taught for 1.5 years elsewhere, most of it full-time. Lot of driving.

Plus now I have read Moby-Dick, not to mention that I can read AND UNDERSTAND entire sentences by: Derrida, Judith Butler and ALL your other mucky-muck theorists.

Also have become vegetarian, become political(ish), start to date, stop dating, start again, stop again, start again, then start again then temporarily commit to the asylum then married a guy, won $1750 in various writing contests, bought some cars. I had never made spaghetti before**, and last night I made pasta with homemade walnut pesto, greenbeans, new potatoes (also some peapods we had) with a side of sauteed kale and cannelini in wine, and the night before that I made vegan scalloped potatoes that were delicious.

So is that Adequate? Huh BMU?***


Just playing with you. I'm not THAT in a wad about it. Although, on the other side, I've been a graduate student for eight years, and I haven't taken my exams. If I had come in as a PhD student, maybe it would be a little embarrassing, especially because the new word on the street is that BMU wants to be able to say its program is doable in 5, maybe 6 years. In practice, people are around a lot longer, or they drop away. I know personally, like, two wonder boys from the program who got a job in 6 or something years. Mostly we don't get done, BECAUSE WE TEACH SO MANY CLASSES AND SO MANY PAPERS IN THOSE CLASSES. Or else, because we get know teaching which means SCRAMBLING literally up until the last minute (CV got a call, remember, three days before the new semester started, offering him a class) and then taking a stupid-ass bagel job (which admit it, you kind of like, a little) or some time-consuming-ass job driving 150 mi/day to teach SAT classes to kids who's allowance is more than your ENTIRE SALARY.


In all honesty, part of my "defensiveness" feels self-righteous, because in their approach to my case BMU has been slipshod: rules weren't in place, chairs were in flux, &c. Um, sure you can enter the master's program! A new teaching contract? Let's see. We'll give you a new contract, because you're now in a new program, but how about if we pretend your new contract started two years ago. You won't be done then? No problem, you can always get an extension.

Except that you can't, not really, at least not this semester.

I have either false confidence or false modesty, I can't decide which.





*Except: yes. That German class. I haven't forgotten.

**Though I HAD made omelets and cookies and special, special salads; I wasn't a total culinary idiot, I just didn't have much experience. How often do dorm kids have occasion to make spaghetti?

***Ooo! Plus I'm less angry now, and my diet is better and I drink less coffee, so to some extent I'm less sweaty. Also less skinny! Ain't progress grand?