And so it goes

2 things.

1 is that there were elections yesterday, something that feels far removed from my life here. Part of that sense of displacement comes, I think, from the fact that I spent the last ten years living in Madison, which is more politically active than here. No, that's not quite what I want to say. Even as I wrote that sentence, the claim that Madison is more political doesn't feel right to me, because Oklahoma is every bit as political as anywhere else. It just masks its politics under claims of common sense, family values, small government, and old-fashioned values, or under the misguided belief that it is somehow separate from national politics.

In fact, more times than not, I tend to feel overwhelmed with just how political Oklahoma is. But being here, rather than Madison, does feel different on the day after an election. An awareness of the political stage, both local and national, and, more importantly, an awareness of how deeply politics is embedded in our everyday lives, was more present in a place like Madison, and I am definitely feeling that lack right now. My inadvertent (on my part) disenfranchisement has probably also contributed to these feelings of distance - I hadn't planned for Oklahoma's 24 day cut off period for registering to vote, so by the time I sent in my info, that deadline has sailed right by. No voting for me!

But, as I said to a number of people, it's not like my vote would have mattered here anyway, which I think is more at the core of my feelings about election day. On the one hand, I have often felt that my vote in this overwhelmingly right-leaning state has little to no chance of being cast in favor of a candidate who will win. Much as I would have liked to see Fallin go, it never seemed a likely proposition. In fact, voting in Wisconsin always gave me an extra thrill, because it was the first place where it felt like my vote really contributed to a result.

But, on the other hand, I am a bit disgusted with the sense of pointlessness and apathy that I brought to this election, try as I did to register. Does voting only matter when you have a good chance of winning? It seems like there is something in the process that should matter, that there is something that *matters* by just showing up, even if (or perhaps even more so when) you know the candidates you support are not going to win.

But that sense of importance gets dampened when, in the course of my day, the people I often encounter don't seem interested in or motivated by the issues that seem so desperately important in another places. Of course, all of those issues trickle down and circulate around Oklahoma, but the shield is pretty thick. And, to be honest, I imagine I don't seem particularly motivated either, outside the bickering I do with family members over things we will probably never agree on.

2nd thing. This first semester is almost over, so much so that I am trying to plan, and replan, by calendar for next semester. I'll be teaching 5 Comp II course and 1 American Lit course, so there's a lot of book-ordering and schedule-revising to be done. The biggest challenge right now is figuring out the role of research and the research paper in my Comp II class. I don't really like how the research paper has gone. I feel like my students benefited from early exercises in exploring research in the world, and research with the OED, and even the annotated bibliography and oral presentations on the information they found. I am less convinced, however, of the benefits of the traditional research paper itself, though whether that's a failure of teaching or of learning, I don't know. I imagine it's both. But I am increasingly aware that this particular brand of paper writing is not the best use of time and energy in a one semester class, even if there are some arguably transferable skills. So, the question is, what do I do instead? A research paper is a required component of Comp II here at TCC, though what exactly "paper" means is not specified. I am thinking I might go back to the journalistic mode I used the last time I taught composition at UW, but that needs to be tweaked.

Other than that, the classes are going generally well. The retention difficulties and lack of completion is new to me, but it is generally understandable. It's a challenge, but, given all the factors affecting community college students, withdrawing from a class is not the worst thing to do.

The Basics

There are a lot of blogs about education and, within that circle, a lot about community colleges. I've been perusing some lately and now know that I lack a considerable amount of knowledge about the blogosphere; my lack of knowledge about community colleges has simply been confirmed.

So, one dilemma facing me is: what to blog? another is: how much to blog under my own name? There are plenty of places to find more, and better, insider info from vastly more-experienced people than me. For exhaustive coverage of pedagogy and resources, look over Community College English. Check out Confessions of an Associate Dean for an anonymous take on a CC in the NE.

But, as I tell my students, I guess part of it depends on audience. For those of you reading this blog just because you know me - surely that's most of you? - and those of you associated with research institutions - surely that's a lot of you? - here are a few basics about my life so far.

Tulsa Community College opened in downtown Tulsa in 1970.

It has four campuses spread around the Tulsa metro area. I work at the newest campus, West, which was founded around 20 years ago.

TCC serves over 35,000 students annually, according to statistics I read on their homepage. I've read different numbers in different places, which I think points to the difficulty in defining and assessing the number of students who attend community college - is that based on enrollment? graduation? completion of a course? These questions in turn point to issues concerning retention and graduation that were not part of daily discussions in my R1 training. 

As English fulltime faculty, my course load is a 5/5. I have one course reassigned this semester for professionalization workshops, putting me at only 4 courses this semester. I am teaching 2 Comp I courses and 2 Comp II courses, both of which meet twice a week. Here's the hourly breakdown:

Teaching: 15 hours
Office Hours: 10 hours
Availability for committee work: 10-ish hours
(Eventual) Reading and Writing Lab Work: 3 hours

For those of you keeping track, there is no time allotted for prep or grading. While much of that, for now, occurs during office hours, this way of doing things is also new.  As time goes on, there are opportunities to have some of those teaching hours transfer to other responsibilities (like the faculty training sessions).

The pay is good, and has the opportunity for more (depending on how many extra courses I teach each semester and in the summer. You can teach up to 7 or 8 courses in the semester, though I am curious as to how many people in comp do that).

I have a good office, smart co-workers who aren't afraid to speak openly about how things work, the freedom to plan my course according to my own choosing, and the relief of a regular income with good benefits.

TCC employs around 275 fulltime faculty and 850 adjuncts, if we believe wikipedia. The experience of adjuncts is much more visible to my own experience as a fulltime faculty member than perhaps it was in the past, though I was also working from a graduate student position, which had some benefits and many limitations. The adjunct/fulltime difference here is visible through things like course guarantees, office space, and weighted preferences in class times/subjects, in addition to the obvious increased pay and full benefits that go along with the position.

My students are similar in many ways to the students I had at UW, at least in the personalities and anxieties they exhibit in the first few days. Still, a higher number of my students here have jobs outside of school and work more hours than their counterparts at UW did. A higher number are returning students; a higher number have children.

According to TCC's Director of Institutional Research, over 36% of students here come from historically-underrepresented groups. From what I can tell looking at UW's enrollment 2013-2014, around 14% of its students come from these under-represented groups. If these numbers are wrong, someone please tell me.

The emphasis on community integration, and the sense that I am living and working in the community I am ostensibly here to serve, is stronger here than it was for me at Madison, though I don't fully subscribe to the town and gown perspective that people often take in relation to research institutions. I value and think there is communal value in academic research of all sorts, from the practical to the more esoteric, and what I'd like to think about more in these coming months is how that belief in research, and in particular humanities research, and in even more particular esoteric humanities research, might play out in the community college classroom. For now, the same emphasis on form - that formal considerations are useful and relevant across academic and popular culture - that guided my research continues to guide my teaching; the same commitment to the public humanities pushes me to orient my classroom as an introduction to the community as much as to academic writing. But that's all just at the level of motivation and intention right now - I don't know how it will play out in the coming months, but I hope to figure out a way to think about it and to write as things move along.

But I also hope that I am able to think more precisely about how the relationship between the humanities and the community college campus goes both ways, that while the humanities have a place in the education and administration of community colleges, community college education has something to teach research institutions about community integration rather than outreach, and what it means to approach your daily work as if it is always already part of a broadly public conversation. And yeah, I did throw "always already" in there. I think it fits.