Inside the Current Issue

Reports from the Front: The Adjuncting Experience

In this special section... The Tensions of Teaching Marriah Star Critical Adjuncting Kimora Reflections of an Adjunct Teacher Daphna El-Roy On Love, Hate and Adjuncting Dan Skinner Graduate Students: Sign your Union Cards! Andrea Morrell Against Tuition Remission, Against PSC Adjunct Unionization Spencer Sunshine The Value of Student Evaluations Jonathan R. Wynn Experts Ask: Do We Need Adjunct Pedagogy? Mark Wilson The New Proletarian Academy James Hoff Teaching Shakespeare with an Eastern European Accent Szidonia Haragos

Teaching Shakespeare with an Eastern European Accent

Szidonia Haragos

I started my "academic career" in the States about five years ago as I moved from Alabama to Pittsburgh to New York City. People and settings changed in my life, but one thing remained constant: adjuncting.

International graduate students are not familiar with the term "adjuncting" before they set out for "America." I would venture to say that few of us really know what we are in for and that, if we did know, some of us might re-consider getting an American degree. At the same time, not knowing what awaits us awakens our survival instinct. American graduate life is a totally different type of existence from the undergraduate experience I had at home. I decided to stay put and survive and, for my first year of graduate study, I was doing just that - surviving and nothing more.

What sharpened my survival skills, but caused me endless anguish in the process, was the obvious imbalance between what I knew and what I was expected to know in American academia. I knew English literature - after all, that was my specialization - but I did not know how to do graduate-level research. I had no clue about teaching English 101 or Freshmen Composition, but to be fair, my American colleagues also struggled with this process. For me it was like navigating unknown waters. I had never taken a Freshmen Comp course, and the idea of teaching undergraduate students how to write scholarly essays was only starting to become known in Eastern European academic institutions (eager, as they were, to follow the American model).

I was assigned to teach in my very first semester, and I was expected to go into an American classroom, meet my first American students and be able to take control of the situation. Nobody understood my sense of alienation. My department, though full of kind and helpful people, was set to run smoothly, and stopping to fix a glitch in the system, even one caused by an international adjunct trying to acquire a sense of belonging, would have been a luxury. Everything - from the elevators to the computers - was new to me. Back in my country, we still handwrote our papers since computers were the privilege of the few.

I dealt with my inefficiencies by becoming apologetic. I started feeling guilty for not measuring up with my American colleagues. I felt that if I became humble and repentant, I would make up for personal incompetence. I grew increasingly sensitive of my accent, especially since I was teaching English writing skills to a group of native speakers. In some obscure way, I felt that by teaching them I was cheating them from the benefit of having a "real" American instructor, with a "proper," native accent. International adjuncts in other departments, like Mathematics or Physics, were teaching the universal language of arithmetic or quantum theory and did not seem so hindered by the lack of native English skills. But for me, the irony of teaching my students their own language became inescapable. I felt as if I was invading their territory, trying to claim possession of what rightfully belonged to them.

Going through my private agony, I made a classic mistake: I tried to befriend my students by sharing my doubts with them. It backlashed, of course. I will never forget one nightmare class when my students, perceiving my insecurity, defended their own incorrect position in an argument on a grammatical issue - not by quoting some rule, but by insisting that since English was their mother language, they knew better. I was ready to quit right then, and it took me expensive S.O.S. phone conversations with my family at home, as well as the advice and support of my American colleagues, to realize that I simply had no other choice than go on. In the end it came down to financial necessity. I stayed. I lost my appetite. I became anorexic and depressed. But I stayed.

While I continued adjuncting because it was the only route open to me, my path ended up contributing to a sense of fulfillment and success on both an academic and a personal level. Step by step, I learned how to be a better teacher and how to feel more at ease with my accent in the classroom. This latter part took some effort, but by my third M.A. degree (Linguistics), I started to grow more and more at ease with my accented English, as well as the fact that my voice will always betray me. It betrayed me when I was trying to pass as a "real" Romanian in my native Transylvania, where I would speak Hungarian in my home community. It betrays me when I open my mouth in or outside the classroom in America.

I am at Hunter these days, teaching Shakespeare with an Eastern European accent, but the difference from my early adjuncting days is that I have stopped apologizing for my accent. Now, not only do I talk about it, but I elaborate on it from time to time. Over the years I have grown to love teaching, and I realize the necessary sacrifices I had to make in order to acquire my feeling of ease and competence. Nonetheless, I always empathize with those international graduate students who are off to a start in adjuncting. I think they need all the help and encourage they can get. They are embarking on what is (at best) an uneasy love affair - but one that will teach them, in turn, about themselves.

Szidonia Haragos is a PhD student in the English department.