It is possible to live yet better. Still — I am now in a position to say I love my job. This is because I am able, this semester, to teach as I see fit. Perhaps this can last.
Someone reminded me of the most devastating of the sentences we had to absorb in Reeducation: that our best thinking was wrong. Had I realized where the Reeducator got that phrase, I would have known it was a stock phrase, something his people throw at everyone. It is a very destructive sentence.
Meanwhile, the students want at least two new courses on Latin American culture: one on homo- and other alternative sexualities and gender arrangements, and another on the criminal justice system, law and society.
I would be for these courses but the problem I have is that I only give one free topic course per year. All the other courses are either literature courses or other introductory courses — introduction to theory, introduction to cultural studies, and so on. So if I develop these at the senior/graduate level (the one course a year in which I can do absolutely anything I choose), I can never teach in field, and it will also mean diverting a lot of my research energy to preparing these classes.
On the other hand, students may not want or need for these courses to be taught at that level. And I can assign queered projects in the survey courses, especially if I do the Spanish one on the model I am using for the Latin American one now. We have these 300 level conversation courses that are supposed to be content based, and if I could teach those, I could prepare courses on the topics above and more much more easily than I could on the same topics for a senior capstone/graduate course. We could have the gender and sexuality unit, the law and society unit, and so on, and students could do research projects in their area of interest, and give presentations.
That would be one more thing to propose to my department chair, and that would be unwelcome. If I teach these courses instead of basic language courses, then the M.A. instructors will not get to teach these courses and will have to teach more basic language courses. I think I am right — one of them tried to throw a student out of the 300 level conversation course because she was not tongue-tied, and does not understand that these courses are not simply chat sessions, but are supposed to be content based, and to teach formal as well as café level speaking.
#OccupyHE
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
“I would be for these courses but the problem I have is that I only give one free topic course per year”
– I only have one free topic course every two years. Not that I have honored this structure, of course. 🙂 But this was specified at the time of hiring and I even pretended to agree.
Also, we never used to allow 300-level courses to be taught by MA instructors but recently this tradition was overrun and a really disastrous precedent was set. I tried objecting but was barked at aggressively. I was in the last months of my pregnancy and didn’t have the energy to battle it.
So now I’m running for our college’s congress.
That is great, you are running for the congress, you will be able to get something done, one hopes. I am in it and Mayhew is president of his, so maybe we can all take over.
When I got here all 300 level courses were taught by MA instructors. Professors could only teach 100 and then 400 up. The idea was equity: since MA people cannot teach senior/graduate courses, they were owed the juniors and seniors. Poor logic, if you ask me.
Now I have managed to push way back on this, got the three core courses taken back to PhD faculty only. But this conversation course is considered the property of instructors and I disagree.