I said I wasn't going to, but here it is

Evidence of Chris' manic mood swings, version 2.3:

I meant what I said in the former entry about positivity, but injustice is injustice and I'm sick of it.  I am aware that the complaints and tortures of being a graduate student are, at best, marginal in the grand scope of things that are unjust and corrupt in the world.  I am quite fortunate to have been born to a good family (despite the usual dysfunctional middle-class shit) in a country that doesn't prohibit the use of my brain and in a world that is generally prosperous and not for want of essentials and more.  Granted, I could have been born to a family in say, southern Sudan, living in a hut, on the run from a hateful muslim government that wants to exterminate me, starving, and being married off to the highest bidder to be one of several wives somewhere in a desert.  But I'm not, and this is my plight, and if I can't shamelessly dump my feelings into a faceless digital environment that doesn't scorn my selfishness, then where can I?

The DU English Department.  Sigh.  All someone ever had to say to any one of the 11 people left in my year of the program was:

"we're going through some big changes, we have no bloody idea what we're doing, we can agree on nothing - not even what the program you're entering is all about - and we plan to put you through several circles of hell whilst twisting our hands maniacally and choreographing complex mixed messages to keep you all from banding together to rebel before you graduate in a confused fog of what you may or may not have gained from your experience here"

That's all.  Why can't they just have told us this?  I probably still would have signed the acceptance sheet, but at least I would have been prepared for battle.  I would have dusted off the armor and sharpened my blades.  Instead, I find myself wandering in the desert and fighting the sand.  Sorry for the mixed metaphor/botched symbolism but I'm pissed and not thinking clearly.  It was enough that we came into a department that openly used us; in the past, the bottom line is that the doctoral students taught comp the first year, and program courses in our second and third.  In order to do this, first year grads had to take a year-long teaching practicum, which proved utterly useless, particularly if you've ever taught in a college classroom and many of us have for a long time now.  Then, in our second year, they said, 

"hey, we're ditching that program and instituting a new one that makes very little practical sense and instead of letting you teach courses you should teach based on your education level, we're going to offer you Business Technical writing through Daniels Business School.  When you're not doing this, you can be a TA for a senior faculty member."

Of course, being a TA when you've been teaching at another university for many years is ludicrous at best, and the person I TA'ed for actually had less classroom experience than I did - in fact, she regularly asked me pedagogical questions.  That was educational, and the experience was similar for the rest of us.  Teaching a business writing course - particularly when I know absolutely nothing about business - was a waste of good time on the part of myself and the students, who were all set to graduate and far more versed in what they were doing than I could ever be.  I taught them some grammar and persuasive writing techniques.  Woo hoo.  

Then, the illustrious Department told us that in our third year we were "being offered the opportunity to teach in the New Writing Program" headed up by some rock star rhetoric guy whose name is apparently just below Christ and Buddha in the universe of all things, and we should be honored to do this.  For those of you not in this loop, composition teaching is fucking composition teaching, and you can call it whatever you like but it doesn't change a thing.  You're still instructing unwilling undergraduates to write in complete sentences, to not plagiarize, use their freakin' spellcheckers, and if you're lucky, to have some kind of sense of the rhetorical situation - that is, an argument.  Not rocket science, people.  I could teach every single person out there how to do all of these things if you didn't already intuit it for yourself.  As a class, we all revolted at this idea, because we both need and want to teach courses that will - I don't know - HELP US TO GET JOBS at the end of this, and anyone, anywhere, can teach a composition course.  Hell, there are people right now teaching at Metro who haven't the slightest clue or proper education to be teaching someone to cross the street, let alone how to compose a research paper, so no one can convince me that teaching freshman comp at DU is somehow better because it's got real money flowing into it.  We won and got to teach program courses this year.

Now it's being demanded of us that - as we near our DOCTORAL degrees, that we enroll in said rhetorical rock star's course in order to "get" to teach comp classes in our fourth year so we can finish our dissertations.  A revolt is under way, and while I'd like to be the one lighting the torches and antagonizing an angry mob to action with outrageous rhetoric about how certain professors are to blame for our lot, I sit at home and blog about it.  I like that 'blog' has become a verb.  

Nevertheless, after all of this - and believe me, that's the Reader's Digest version - today I am informed by the same powers that be in this department that, one week before classes are to begin and I've juggled an unholy schedule at two campuses to make it work, I am being told that I cannot take one of the classes I want because some undergraduate students complained that they couldn't get into the class and they have to graduate soon.  I don't normally call it out this plainly, but I'm taking that fucking class, and I'd like to see any one of those fuckers just TRY to stop me.  My line is drawn in the sand.  It ends here.  I shall be pushed no further and I no longer care whose feelings get hurt or who hates my guts after this.

If you're still reading, bless you for putting up with it.