Dear First Year Students, Here’s Something You Should Know About Your Instructors

AHHHH, September. The good month. Summer is a bullshit season and I'm glad it's dead. Bring on fall fashion and the flood of bad jokes about white girls and pumpkin spice.

September is basically New Years for anyone who is either still in school, or for whom the rhythm of work or home life is driven by students. Which is probably most of us, or at least the target demographic reading this article. Hello! Please follow us on Snapchat. Soon the formerly quiet halls of Academia will be full to bursting with fresh-faced young undergrads who are thirsty for life, knowledge, sex, or any other activity they can use to justify their astronomical student debt load. Disgusting. I hate these children with my life. It is impossible to get a goddamn coffee in less than 15 minutes now and also they remind me how of how thoroughly broken I am by years of grad school. Chances are, no matter where you find yourself in your undergraduate career—from Year 1 to Year "no, Mom, Medieval Studies is definitely the right major for me, this time I'm sure" —you will find yourself in one or more Introductory (i.e. 101) courses. They're your whirlwind tour through a subset of the accumulated human knowledge of three millennia as categorized by some sexually-repressed Edwardians and, later, introspectively fucked to death by the French. It's a real rollercoaster, and you will be tested on it. Read more: Undergrads Today Are the Worst: A TA's Confession These classes are also usually held in cavernous lecture halls filled with hundreds of other students (depending on the size of your school, the popularity of the course, and its value as a pre-req). My first year Intro to Psychology clocked in at somewhere between 450 and 500 students. It was taught by three professors in a TV studio by way of a giant projector screen while a small army of TAs scrambled around the room keeping order and handing out multiple choice exams. It was madness. But compared to the situation on most North American campuses these days, a giant disembodied head shouting at you about masturbation is a pretty good arrangement. At least the head had benefits. By contrast, most of your instructors in Intro classes will be sessional instructors, or "per contract academics," or whatever other jargon the institution uses in place of "hyperexploited precarious labour." These are usually PhD candidates caught on the post-funding dissertation treadmill, or—worse—new PhDs with no immediate job prospects, crushing debt, rent to pay, mouths to feed, and forced to cobble together something resembling a life out of a jumble of part-time contracts. On paper, at least, this would be fine—except that sessionals are notoriously underpaid compared to full-time faculty doing similar work. Depending on which part of the country you find yourself in, sessionals make between $4,000-$9,000 per course, with benefits hinging largely on whether or not they're in a union. Even if they're assigned a TA, they can expect to spend at least 30 hours a week per course—more if they're running it solo, more if it's the first time they're teaching the class, and yet more still if they have a lot of students. This is the situation in Canada, anyway. Like all the rest of this country's social problems, they are comically magnified in the United States. At least up here, most of the people teaching you about modernist literature probably aren't living out of their cars. (Yet.) But, okay. Maybe you don't think this is a problem. Perhaps you are a clown, and say this is surely a sign that there are too many PhDs, and too many students are signed up for too many classes about dumb topics like how society works or whether our slow march into the grave has meaning. School is bad unless it's teaching kids how to make money and/or oil and/or medicine. Let's get brutally utilitarian about all this. Students might choose their school based on swanky research labs, cutting-edge sport complexes, and the faint chance of eventually sitting in a seminar circle with an academic superstar, but the enormous introductory classes are really the linchpin of the entire operation. These are, arguably, the most important classes. They're the classes that capture the interest and attention of precocious young minds; they plant the seed of a beautiful (if poisonous) passion for knowledge that the Academy is built to cultivate. Less romantically, they ensnare the enrollment numbers used to help determine which faculties and departments get funding and attention from the powers that be. They are the broad base for both the pyramid of knowledge and the pyramid scheme of the corporate university. But here's the rub: the intake valves of our gleaming Knowledge Economy are staffed by underpaid, overworked, and underappreciated part-time contract workers. No doubt farming out this work to the lowest bidder saves some coin for the jet-setting executives at the university's apex, but the learning environment it creates is neither especially effective or particularly dignified. I mean, you're paying a stupid amount of money for this shit: shouldn't the people teaching you have enough support to do it properly? Shouldn't the people qualified and passionate enough to pursue a teaching career—even in these brutal conditions—be able to give students attentive instruction unmediated by worrying about how they're going to get by every month? You don't need an MBA (lol) to know that you generally get what you pay for, and that garbage in = garbage out. Of course, since this is the university—where the comprehension of a problem comes anywhere from five to 50 years after its appearance—the system will probably degenerate into something much worse before anyone figures out what to do about sessional slave labour. Even then, it'll probably be something worse, like a CGI bee that teaches you calculus through a closed Facebook group you unlock by paying tuition. In the meantime: be nice to your instructors. The wilted Powerpoint slide they're showing you is the culmination of a decade of bad life choices in a dehumanizing economy. Please do not harass them to posting it online so you can just download it and skip their class. Good students are the only reason to get up in the morning and it's cruel to take that away. Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.