If you don't have something nice to say. . .

So I managed to somehow choke my golden goose this week.
No, I didn't get kicked out of my graduate program, but I did managed to lose my moonlighting gig as a test-prep instructor.

Here's the scoop.
I am, as many know, finishing my ph.d. and holding a 50% teaching appointment in my dept. on campus. On the side, I also teach test prep for approximately 40 hours a quarter. In the beginning, these classes took a lot more than the in-class time to prepare, but now, all that preparation had finally started to pay off. Or so I thought.

The next version of my class is scheduled to be a "blended" course. My colleagues have decided that for test prep, online courses are the way of the future, so the class was going to be half online and half face-to-face. I was less than thrilled about this, not only because no one had so much as asked me for my opinion about the decision to go online, but also because it meant that I would have to type out all my lecture notes into textbook quality material for half of my lesson plans. The notes I inherited from my predecessor were nowhere near what I would need to make this work, so I was looking at a LOT of extra time over the next few weeks, again unpaid, to get these classes ready. i mentioned my dissertation and dept. teaching right?

In addition, I found out earlier this week that I was also expected to enroll in an online training course for the software that we'd be using. I also found out that this was unpaid (apparently, my getting the training and imprving my teaching was supposed to be payment enough), I like teaching. i really do, but give me a break. This is a job not a leisure time activity. Not only that, but the class had already started two weeks earlier, and my program manager had forgotten that I would need to enroll, so I was already behind and expected to "play catch up" with no extra time allocated for someone else's screw-up.

I mentioned the dissertation, teaching and 40 hours I'm already working for the current class, right?

So to make a long story short, when they told me about this course, I went ballistic.
Ironically, the first email I composed was far worse than the one I sent, which was "mean-spirited." Looking at it now, the one I sent probably did come across as nasty, but I really did think that I had been showing a lot of restraint given the circumstances. In any event, I have a very sarcastic streak, and it just bit me in the ass.

Still, I triple-dog-dare anyone to find a person with a pulse to not be angry at such an oversight. Especially when this is not the first time something like this has happened. It is by far the worst oversight I've been dealt, but stuff like this has happened regularly to me in the time that I've had the job, and it has happened to a coworker too. What makes it especially inexcusable to me is that there were three people who needed the training--one for fall, one for winter, and one for spring (me)
. Why no one told me about this back when the decision was made in the first place absolutely boggles my mind. I could have done it in the fall or in december or even this term if they would have just let me know in advance so that I could plan my schedule accordingly. But apparently three people is too many for my program manager to handle. (sadly, I think she almost dropped the ball on fall person too, but someone else noticed so that instructor got a whole week warning before her training course began!)

One of my tragic flaws is that I have very little patience for incompetence, whether my own or someone else's. Combine that with the fact that I'm already pretty horribly stressed out right now about other matters, it's not surprising that I finally cracked.

Still, it pisses me off that I got fired for my remarks when I had a legitimate (if poorly articulated) response to a pretty major screw-up.

But part of me thinks that they were probably looking for a reason not to offer the class next quarter anyway since no one has signed up for it yet . . . numbers have been decreasing (one of the reasons we were going online in the first place) steadily over the last few years, and apparently the entire program is in jeopardy (not that I'm surprised when it is so poorly managed!).

I wonder what's going to happen now to the spring class. Surely, there's no one else willing to write five lectures worth of material from scratch for free. It was going to be a pain in the ass for me, and I've been doing this for a while now. The other instructors would be starting from nothing (because they teach different exams, and they're all different enough to require substantial work and fuck me if they're getting my materials now!).

They'll find someone to take over eventually, because no matter how horrible the job is, there will be a grad student somewhere desperae enough for extra money to do it. The hourly wage is good--the problem is that they expect you to work a lot of additional hours off the clock (they don't tell you that up front).

I guess the best part of all of this is that it is no longer my problem, and it does get me off the hook for a whole lot of stuff that I would have had to deal with and stress over for the next several weeks. And if I'm going to get fired, at least it was from a job that won't affect my actual career prospects. In fact, most of my advisors didn't think I should be teaching the test-prep anyway, but at the time that I took the job, I really needed the money. Things financially are slightly less claustrophobic for the time being, and I've managed to save a little bit for the first time ever in my life (though it's back to living paycheck to paycheck come march).

Now at least there is one less thing in my life for me to worry about, and you know what, they can keep their money if I can keep my sanity. I just wish that I had kept my cool too, but I guess I've learned something from the whole thing. If only they didn't get to be so sanctimonious about it . . .

note to self: next time, take the high road.