Ruminations-Cancelled Classes (It Is What It Is)

Reflecting on the bad news that I received earlier this week.

A traveling salesman pulls up in front of a farmhouse and knocks on the door. Before he can get to his sales pitch the farmer’s wife tells him he wants to speak to her husband, he is out back feeding the pigs. He follows the path around to the back of the house and sees the farmer struggling to wrestle a huge hog upright so that the hog can reach up to the branches of the apple tree and eat the low hanging apples. The salesman watches for a long time and finally exclaims: “This has got to be the biggest waste of time I have ever seen in my life!” The farmer turns around and says: “Time? What’s time to a pig?”

This is my friend Rick’s favorite joke when we were gradual students at Georgia Tech many years ago. It is also a very long way to get to the point. I was scheduled to teach the Introduction to Electric Energy Systems class this Fall. I was supposed to start class August 19. I was told by email by the head of the department that the university had changed the class enrollment rules in May, the minimum number of students needed to convene a class had changed from 7 students to 10 students, exceptions being for graduate level courses. I had 8 students signed up, so my class was axed. The head of department was apologetic, but he was under orders from those further up the administration food chain. I had heard rumors that the university, a private institution, was under pressure from the twin pincers of lowered enrollment because of the changing demographics — people slowed down having babies twenty years ago — and the financial pinch that the pandemic placed on smaller institutions. I had seen that some tenured faculty had chosen to take the retirement route as the university had incentivized the retirement packages. Some staff were not replaced as they either took retirement or found other jobs, while there weren’t any layoffs, the departments were “encouraged” to minimize overhead and there was talk of combining departments and schools to minimize the number of courses and degrees offered officially.

Even as I thought about the situation throughout the Spring and Summer, I continued to prepare for my Fall class. The university has migrated to a new Learning Management System (LMS), so I decided to take advantage of the change and refresh my approach to teaching a class that I had been teaching for five years. I had re-read William Zinsser’s Writing to Learn (Zinsser, 1993) and taken his idea of Writing Across Curriculum to heart, so I was busily reading and thinking about how I was to incorporate short and informal writing assignments into a class that was well suited for this kind of experiment. While the subject is very technical, the holistic nature of the subject includes elements of economics, public policy, history, and other social sciences integrated with the technical topics. I was and still am quite excited about the possibilities.

Unfortunately, my preparation came to a screeching halt last week.

I am now, like the pig trying to eat the apple, left with time on my hands: what’s time to Pete? (How is that for a roundabout way to get back to the joke?)

The departments in the university are trying mightily to help the students navigate this quagmire while also pondering their own future within the university. There are some students who needed this class as pre-requisites for the classes that they would need to graduate, so the faculty and staff are dealing with potentially affecting student graduation plans; while other students had wanted to enter this area but are temporarily thwarted in pursuing the area directly. As an adjunct, I had very little input in helping the students, all I can do is sympathize.

The existential pain that I suffered comes from my own agenda, I lament the lost talents that might have chosen the electrical energy milieu which are potentially shunted into other technical areas because of this unplanned and unintended hurdle. I have treated my classes in electric power as a PSA for our energy future, a self-appointed mission to educate students; even for those students who take my classes but do not enter into the electric energy area as a concentration, I teach the class as a means to open the students minds to the realities of the electric energy past, present, and future so that they can learn and assess the true information in their effort to think clearly on the subject, basing their thoughts on the realities. I try to teach the students how to decipher the quantitative information that populates the mass media, I teach them how to filter out the questionable information and t think critically about the rest of the information so that they can avoid the easily reached but skewed conclusions. I try to give my students the scientific basis for our energy present so that they can form reasonable opinions. The answers are out there, but the superfluous, the uninformed, and the deliberately misleading information need to be eliminated by student action. I am lamenting the lost opportunity to do so with this particular class.

My sadness over the loss of this opportunity to teach is not completely selfless, there are some very personal and selfish reasons for the melancholia that I am experiencing. When I stepped away from corporate life and stepped into the adjunct role within academia six years ago, I was greatly surprised by the students that I had the pleasure of teaching. My first class stood out because it was my first experience with the present generation of college students. I have coached younger people, mainly through my role as club volleyball coach, but I have not been able to work with older and more mature groups of young people who are preparing to join the work force. I did not know what I needed to do to help them to prepare for the future, I did know that my industry experience was a good resource to call upon as reference for their consideration. My personal experiences as an undergrad were both a little blurry to be of much use. My scant memories of that time recalled that my fellow graduates were more interested in bulling their way into an entry level job with the IBM’s, AT&T’s, and GE’s of the world rather than having the vision to prepare themselves for the task of improving the human condition and advancing our society, culture, and earth.

What I found in that first class was a motivated group of eager young faces, very aware of their options, their surroundings, and the hands that they were dealt. I was impressed with the general sense of altruism and idealism that pervades their attitudesand their perspective on the future for their generation, a future made much worse by the foibles, excesses, and hubris of my generation. The students from that first class were more concerned about the global warming crisis, they were aware of the geo-political elements that are parts of the arguments for and against institutional actions and policies to stop global warming. My role, as I saw it, was to teach them about the technologies: the unadorned and essential physical facts, which I was too happy to do. As that first class continued, I became more impressed with their seriousness and their wide-eyed wonderment over the sciences and engineering. I started to see the future through their eyes even as I was far too cynical to be called an optimist. I ameliorated my cynical perspective because of their perspective. They made my outlook on the future much more optimistic; I felt that that was a fair exchange, I traded my cynicism for their fresh eyes, and they traded their lack of technical perspective for my experience and applied knowledge.

The good feeling continues to this day six years later.

Fast forward to today, a week after my finding out about my class being cancelled, as I sit on my butt trying to clear out all the to-do list items from my working memory and schedule in addition to having my little woe-is-me pity party, I am thankful for the Olympic coverage last week because my attention was diverted throughout the week as I mentally processed the news. I would not belittle the twelve step programs to say that I experienced all the steps involved in recovery, as I can’t even name all twelve steps by name, but I did go through enough of the emotional roller coaster ride to make the past week not a whole lot of fun.

This process would have been even worse had I not applied a central tenet of Stoicism: the control dichotomy. As an adjunct professor I control very little of what happens to me in the grander scheme of university administration and politics, so I resolved to worry only about what I can control, because that mentality had influenced my outlook on life considerably, but knowing and applying the control dichotomy also doesn’t prevent me from feeling the deep emotions of being denied something that I have come to enjoy and psychologically depend on as I mourn the loss of  the experience of teaching this year’s class. In my mind’s eye, it was already an epic class.

It is what it is.

References

Zinsser, W. (1993). Writing To Learn. NYC: Harper Perrenial.