One Less Task, More Or Less

I spent this morning not grading essays. It was nice.

Most of my Saturday mornings since 2019 have been devoted to the Never-Ending Online Class, which I signed up for because I’m an adjunct instructor who has managed to cobble together a career in academia without a tenure-track job and you don’t do that by saying no to offers when they come by. The first thing you learn as an adjunct is that the people who offer you jobs have a memory that has room for exactly one item and that item is whatever you told them the last time they offered you a job. If you say no to any offer, they will never offer you another thing again. So I’ve said yes to a lot of offers over the last few years and I’ve learned things I never thought I would know and managed to pay bills at the same time, so I suppose it’s worked out.

The Never-Ending Online Class works on a subscription model. Students sign up for a three-month period and they get access to the course. All of the material is already there on the website and they complete the course at their own pace. I grade the essays as they come in, provide feedback so they can do better on the next one, and answer questions as needed. I’m also required to have one hour per week of virtual office hours, to which not a single student ever came. These students will email if they have a question. Every month one cohort leaves and another comes in so there are always three different cohorts in the class. It runs year-round, every month new names on the screen.

When the previous instructor had to bow out of the class because his campus wouldn’t let him continue on with it, he offered it to me and I said “yes” because, as noted, that’s what you do as an adjunct.

And pretty much every Saturday morning since then I have fired up the Internet Machine wherever I was and graded whatever essays came in the previous week. I’ve graded essays on laptops in Philadelphia, New York, and Tennessee and on my phone in Italy, Portugal, and Hungary. Sometimes there have been two dozen essays to grade – all of them somewhere around 1000 words – and sometimes there have only been one or two. Once in a great while I get a week without them, but since 2019 I can count those weeks on my fingers.

You get to know the patterns. The class is set up with four units of three essays, and they have to do two from each unit for a total of eight. Some questions almost never get answered while others seem to appeal to every student. Most students submit work as they complete it so they can get the feedback for the next one, but some wait until the last minute to submit all eight, hoping for the best. If they submit all of them in the first week of the course, that’s usually a bad sign. So is doing the first eight assignments without bothering to check how many from each unit to do.

And each year the class would pay me somewhere around the equivalent of one or two adjunct classes, which was enough to cover bills and perhaps parts of vacations, but not enough to be the wealthy and powerful professor that so many elected officials seem to think I am. It was a nice gig that way.

But after six and a half years it was time to move on.

My kids are both in graduate school now, and we no longer have to save for college. The house and the cars are paid off. And I am at the point in my life where I wanted my Saturday mornings back.

Plus, AI has been a catastrophe and I got tired of reading essays that nobody wrote. Most students know better, but there are always a select few who think that outsourcing their brain to a hallucinating machine is an acceptable way to live, and that wears on a body after a while. There will come a day when everyone will regard AI with the same dripping contempt that we now reserve for diploma mills and industrial toxic waste producers but today is not that day. Tomorrow doesn’t look good either.

So I turned in my notice and as of the first of this year I am no longer the instructor for that course.

It turns out, though, that leaving the Never-Ending Online Class is about on par with leaving the Mafia since they have constantly been trying to pull me back into the life even though everyone involved is perfectly fine with me moving on.

I understand this, really I do. I fall through a whole pile of HR cracks in this system and trying to get anything done that involves HR has always been far more complicated than it should be. The Never-Ending Online Class is offered by one of the current iterations of the Online Campus (there are several) but for bureaucratic reasons that do make sense when someone explains them slowly enough my contract for that class was actually with R1 University. My advising job and most of my classes are at Home Campus and my US1/US2 Zoom class is at Far Away Campus, both of which are glommed onto larger campuses these days and many but not all of the HR decisions that affect me in those jobs come from the larger campuses rather than the ones I actually do the work for. Combine that with the fact that my advising job is a) grant-funded, which is a whole other kettle of weird, and b) considered “non-academic staff” rather than the “academic staff” category that my teaching jobs fall into and it gets complicated. I have so many different supervisors and provosts that even routine things can be tricky.

Three summers ago, for example, the folks who run the Never-Ending Online Class asked me to revise the course, which is something that they like to see happen every so often. I spent the summer doing that – reorganizing the web page, revising and in some cases replacing some of the essay assignments, and so on. The new version went live on October 1 that year. I’d been promised a small stipend to do all of this work, and at some point in September when they were sure I’d actually finish the job they started that process. The form required signatures from my immediate supervisor and the relevant provost. Which ones were those? Why, son, that’s a verrrrry interesting question, ain’t it? Yes, indeed, it was. Let’s just say that I didn’t get paid until nearly Christmas and leave it at that. At one point even the guy who hires adjuncts at Far Away Campus got involved, much to his bewilderment.

The new instructor taking over the Never-Ending Online Class officially started on January 1. We had a meeting in December with the guy in charge of the program to iron out the transition and I got the October cohort’s grades posted before I left, so it seemed like we were on the right track.

But I kept getting notifications for the course and students kept emailing me about things. I asked the guy in charge of the program to take me off the course, but it turns out he can’t do that. And IT said they couldn’t do that either. Eventually the R1 Campus IT folks said they could do it if the program made a formal request, so they did. That turned out to be incorrect. Apparently someone at R1 has to make this request. I’m not sure whether they have or not. So I just forward stuff over to my successor, ignore the notifications, and try not to think about Marlon Brando.