Friday Meeting

The college has had a useful series of workshops this semester that have made the department much tighter as a group, I think. I now feel that I have gotten to know some of the part-time instructors, though some that I've grown to value as colleagues are already leaving. That's how being a part-timer is; people drift hither and yon, looking for a more permanent position. For me, the part-time life has been a permanent impermanence. I have gone through phases, sometimes in the past feeling angry and alienated, a second class citizen, sometimes feeling privileged to be part of such a wonderful department where I can spend my life discussing books and talking about writing and not having to be responsible for the nitpicky details of full-time committee work, etc. But these meetings have definitely made me feel closer to everyone in the department and they have given me insight into the workings of the department and of the school that I did not have before.
It was very interesting today to have a sort of mini-class meeting for the composition class I am teaching, in rhetoric and research. It is the first time I have taught it, and the first time in a long time I have taught that level at all. I have run into a problem with the research paper, the major assignment in the class, and I have learned that this is more or less the same set of problems many people who are teaching this class face. First of all, there are inadequate materials in the library database for my students to write their papers. And the students were struggling so much with the preliminary assignments I gave them (which were supposed to be finished weeks ago) that the research project will have to be slighted, not the least because there will be insufficient materials to do the work at our library. I have already researched several topics myself, and found this to be the case. We will have to work individually. Luckily, I have only a very few students in my classes this semester, so I can find materials for each one and pass them along, but the idea was to get them to research their topics themselves, and they will not be able to do that very well. And we will probably have to visit UCI library as a class and do some research in the next week or so. This coming week we are going to the college library, but I already know that won't be sufficient. Next semester, when I teach the class again, I hope to remedy that problem, but I am not exactly sure what the best way to do that would be. Today helped me verbalize all of this, since I was only muddling along by myself up to today in relation to these problems, and it seems that is what happens to most people who teach the class.