don't teach

I make no attempt to separate my work from the wider context of my life. I am, against my best efforts, a teacher in the same way that I am blind, queer, human. Folks in my axe league call me “Doctor Professor” (I am technically neither, but make no attempt to correct them) and I make the passions I carry into work clear beyond classrooms and office hours. An identity of said calibre is not one escaped lightly and stripping it from my carapace is reminiscent of shedding the epidermis without the benefit of evolutionary pressure to select for such a pain. But my taxes, stacks of W2s to reassure the government that they did, indeed, take enough of my money, push my mammalian organs towards a crustacean’s habitual shelling.

Nineteen thousand four hundred and ninety-three United States Bank notes deposited into my barren checking account over the course of a non-leap year. Four thousand dollars above the poverty line and forty thousand dollars below the estimated median income. I have a master’s degree. Teaching experience. Good student evaluations. I don’t have tenure or full-time status, nor did I in 2025 (the tax year in question here). The College of Saint Scholastica is not wiling to grant me either.

I can not survive on this.

I do not want to survive on this.

No one should have to survive on this.

The plight is not unique to adjuncts such as me as tenured professors are working an extra, sometimes two extra jobs, just to get by, even as they lead their field in the institution. Doctors of chemistry, biology, English, philosophy, history, you can find them delivering your drinks at the local bars, mixing whiskey in the back, selling sweaters to tourists at Duluth Trading Company. Not out of passion, but to fund their hobby that should be a career, their passion, as is mine, lies in their discipline, in their pedagogy. The former are important jobs, don’t get me wrong. We need folks, well paid folks, stocking the shelves and serving our restaurants, and they, too, are frequently double dipping in the employment ramekin. These problems are systemic and I’ve lived through those positions myself, both as a double dipper and a one and done tortilla chip dunk.

I remember the feel of the shoes I’ve worn out walking the road to get to where I can step in front of students and share my knowledge and my experiences. For each shoe tread down through the sole I’ve broken two canes, snapped in the cracks set into the road by institutions that would love nothing more than to see me and my disabled kin dead without a headstone. Teaching, contrary to the barriers disabled folks have to break through, is one of the few careers I can pursue with a comparatively small amount of fundamental changes to my own habits. I don’t need my eyes to teach even if academia claims I do. But the pain of getting to that place to begin with, the long line of shattered canes, makes the dismal number on my W2 all the more insulting. I made it and everything in our culture says that surviving reaps a reward beyond the next breath.

Yet I feel myself approaching the terminus inhale as teaching, doing what I love, has run out of oxygen.

A platitudinous statement that retains power through its cliché, “I learn just as much as my students do when I teach”, sticks to my skin. My writing would be in a buried gutter if I were not always teaching writing. I would have little enforced motivation to build new skills and recontextualise old ones were it not for the need to do so to effectively teach my students. Teaching as identity blurs into my identity as a writer, as an author (unpaid as of right now, sue me). Where the teacher ends and the human begins is unclear, but where the teacher ends and the writer begins is basically a state of quantum superposition. Do I spin left or right? Is the cat dead or alive? Open the box and there’s just another box with two cats, we hope.

But I’m a responsible Marxist in that I can wax poetic about this hippie shit for pages and pages and it’ll prove something and get some hearts fluttering, sure, but to buy canes I need money. To buy food, I need money. To stop flirting with the idea I’m working through here: I have to quit teaching and I hate teaching because of that. The base necessity of being disabled, frequent and intense healthcare needs, goes unmet by my pay check as those pay checks are not paired with medical benefits of any variety. My eyes, born with me, betray a greater need than just money, I need the benevolence of an antagonistic system. My material conditions ultimately need to come before the passions that drive me as a passion can not drive a corpse and improper material conditions only create corpses.

The “hippier” among readers will suggest that I’ll always be a teacher in some capacity. That it’s foolish to assume my identity is paired to my employment status and I’m doing naught but allowing capitalism to dictate the workings of invisible chambers of my heart, the antithesis of my responsible Marxism. Checkmate, right? Nah. Sure, I can always be a “teacher” to friends and readers and the platforms to facilitate those relationships exist in great quantity (we are on one now). Money may even be made in those pursuits, “subscribe now for $2 a month to help me pay my way through this identity crisis” or some shit.

The point, ultimately, is less about identity as something I can pair with the tenuous concept of a soul, or the thesis of my being, but more about the reality we live in where our hard work dedicated to accomplishing the manifestation of said goals waits in line to be spit on. I am, to the reassurance of loved ones and my therapist, a good teacher. The meritocracy suggests that I should be getting rewarded for that. The time I’ve invested into this profession suggests that I should get rewarded for the precious hours of my life dumped into the value of The College of Saint Scholastica. Fair pay, reflective of the ideals of my labour and expertise, tells me that simply recognising the permanence of “teacher as identity” is not enough. A spoiled child I may be, but I’m tired of being told I can’t be spoiled by the most silver-spooned pedophiles to ever sit on a board of directors.

“Then quit!” Okay. Thanks for the solution. I didn’t go to school to not be able to identify solutions, I went to be able to work through the process of these solutions. Plus, I’m a revolutionary, if I can humbly call myself that. If I quit, quietly and without my trademark thrashing about, then I do nothing but condemn myself, and more importantly, those who come after, to the same fate. Apathy created this system and selfishness maintains it. We can not afford to be either as this struggle, those nineteen thousand dollars, are about more than just me.

The quitting that seems inevitable would be a painful process. The shell would need to be peeled off my bloodied flesh and the boxes would need to be opened with the prayer that the cats aren’t dead. I don’t want to quit. “What else would I do?” plagues my mind, not just with my identity seemingly at stake, but with my reality pushing pieces into places that others don’t have to build around. Academia, as I said, is unfriendly to the disabled, but I can shove it around to make it uncomfortably fit. Other careers, other jobs, are hostile and would rather be dead than see “blind” listed among the attributes of its work force.

It is a glue without a solvent that pins me in my frame. I’ll have to rip and tear, and I don’t want to lose more of myself to a life I didn’t choose to be born into. But I am still compelled to survive.

To survive, yes, I will likely have to switch careers or make some threats or maybe both. I started teaching at another university which helps, but does not cure the illness, only buys some time. But my exit survey will not be pleasantries, nor will I allow it to end at the “Submit” button.