The Story

So here's the story. I got to teach one section of composition at my undergraduate school because I went by to say hello to my former professors about a week before school started. A few days later, the chair of the department called me. They had too many freshmen. Would I be willing to teach? I said "sure." I guess a master's degree in English is a marketable asset after all. She said I should come to the yearly faculty orientation. I asked when it was. She said if I came down right now, she could introduce me to the faculty. I went.

It's pretty weird teaching at my undergraduate school and knowing that my students have to go to chapel and sign out on weekends and such. I never liked those things much when I was there. But I recently gave them an assignment to compare and contrast something. The most-repeated essay type explains why it's better to go to a relatively conservative Christian university like mine than to a public one. Go figure.

It can be pretty fun working with people as they figure out how to write though. I like trying to find how I can help them be better at it. However the pay for an adjunct composition teacher is really poor. On a per-hour basis, I don't make minimum wage at it. This is partially because I'm still developing the way that I teach. Teaching is a lot like acting with a lot of improvisation worked in, except the first few years through it's also like playwriting because I also have to make up my material.

Since I only do teaching part time, at least in theory, I've also gotten a part time job working a press. I like being a pressman too and it also balances out the kinds of thinking I do as a writing teacher. Instead of working with lots of words like I do in teaching and thinking about people's writing, running a press involves thinking about mechanics - shapes and such. (Now if only I could get a balance job for teaching where I did physical work! Then I could get paid for exercise!) I also spend a lot of time sitting and watching what comes out of the press. It's prime time for brain relaxation and contemplation. Or just listening to Sunny 92.3.

Sunny 92.3 plays constantly at the place where I work. I’ve learned that the second part of a certain Maroon 5 song can actually be sung as a round. “She will… I don’t mind spending every day…She will…Standing outside in the pouring rain…” Singing a round with the radio in my head or making up harmonies makes me so happy that I can pretty much ignore the fact that I’ve heard the song every work day for the past month or two. It’s a good thing that Sunny 92.3 doesn’t play songs more than once a day. And it's also a good thing that neither Rod Stewart nor the Eagles quite makes me throw up because I hear a lot of them – sometimes more than once a day. However once in awhile – ok more than once a day – the never-ending love songs get a little too sappy for me. But I've discovered that if I pretend that the singer is a hippopotamus or a dodo bird those songs suddenly become absolutely hilarious. Try it! It works! Oh, and by the way, I don’t do any of this out loud. I just sit at my press or clean off the rollers while all this is going on in my head.