A bit of a detour. A friend is on the job market right now (aren't we all?) and is looking for any kind of teaching job she can get while she finishes her PhD in literature. As anyone involved in lit knows, our funding requires that we teach courses in freshman composition. It's our bread and butter. Many of us would rather be teaching literature, I assume, but most of us understand that we get both money and protection from the university because we are willing to take on the burden of teaching writing (at a bargain, of course). Most of us don't love it. In fact, I don't even know many rhetoric folks who love teaching introductory comp courses. But most of us do understand how important it is, and some days we like doing it a great deal.
Today my friend received a response to her enquiry about a part-time adjunct gig being offered at a four-year institution. The director of the program asked a number of nearly-insulting questions and required an absurd level of commitment (as soon as possible) with absolutely no show of good faith (like, informing my friend of the salary, ahem, wage). But maybe the most bizarre thing the director asked was whether my friend was passionate about teaching composition.
Passionate. I'm not the sure the word should ever be used to describe how someone is required to feel about work. Teaching comp, like anything, is about making a living. Yes, those of us who do it, even those that would rather be teaching nineteenth-century American literature, are aware of how important it is and feel at times a great deal of satisfaction when we empower our students with language. But why should we be expected to be any more passionate about it than an accountant is about balance sheets.
There's something insidious in the idea. Let me try to explain as coherently as I can. People who work and get paid are not passionate about their work, which doesn't mean they don't enjoy their work or don't feel compelled to perform their best. On the other hand, people who have hobbies and don't get paid are passionate about their hobbies. People who are bad at singing and embarrass themselves on American Idol auditions (and who don't get paid) are passionate about singing.
Here's the point: if we're required to be passionate, there's the assumption that we don't need to be paid much or anything to do the thing we're passionate about. Teachers are all required to be passionate, and to (god forbid) ask for a living wage defiles the whole institution. After all, when love's involved, the exchange of money amounts to prostitution. If we love a thing we do it for free, sacrifice ourselves to it. It's part of the unspoken vow of poverty all teachers somehow implicitly accept. But we do ourselves a disservice by not questioning the vow, which is in all ways underwritten by the idea that we (are privileged to) love what we do.
Most of us who teach comp, or teach any of the language arts, have good and bad days like everyone else. Like everyone else, there are days when we absolutely hate our jobs (yes, I said hate and job). And like everyone else, we are trying desperately to make a living. I don't want to love what I do, not all the time, and I certainly don't want to be passionate about it, because it's an inappropriate description and, frankly, sort of creepy. I want to be paid appropriately to perform a job I have been trained to perform.
The irony is that my friend does, most days, seem to enjoy her work as an instructor of composition and literature, but this job, which requires her to be passionate, will barely pay her enough to stay alive. It amounts to volunteering, with a meager stipend for food. How can we love ourselves, let alone our jobs, if we continue to (allow ourselves to) be valued so low?
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