Why A&M San Antonio?

I'm a professor. I am one of the hundreds of thousands of over-educated, under-appreciated, and under-paid non-tenured faculty at a high minority, low SES, low funded, urban institutions of higher learning. When I calculate the time and money spent traveling, grading, answering email, teaching and planning, my wages come to about $10 an hour. Faced with this situation at any other job, I'd leave. But these conditions are outweighed by the simple fact that I am needed. When I walk into my classroom, as I will tomorrow, there are 35 pairs of eyes ready and waiting for me to be brilliant, to make them think, to learn. I can't turn away.

My students are oblivious to the internal wrangling of academia, and they aren't interested in how much money I make. They just want someone to teach them. But, once they leave the confines of my classroom, they are on their own. They have the charge to change education, to make it better, to create and inspire. I have but a semester; that goal keeps me interested. That goal is worthy of the Olympics of teaching.

Each week I read pages from each of them--about frogs, wars, Mexican food, their thoughts. The conversations after class concern lives, thoughts, and loves. One such involved Marta, a wonderful 45ish woman with a short black bob haircut and mantras about children. She told me, "When this class started I thought you were nuts. Young and nuts. Now, I can't go back to thinking that children are just empty bottles, waiting to be filled. They are full bottles ready to be recycled, foamingly eager, carbonated with ideas. This whole time I was waiting for some professor to teach me how to teach reading. You taught me how to think. That's more valuable, I think."

It is often my students' complicated lives walk off the page and into my classroom. But it is their lack of pretension, their raw and life experienced intellect. Messages arrive in my inbox from hotmama71 and rustytheyorkie81 and almost every message begins with, "Hi, my name is XXX and I am in your XXX class." They aren't afraid to tell me when I am talking too fast or otherwise confusing them. They are upfront and not afriad to tell me when what we are doing is boring. In college and graduate school, I learned to hide my ignorance, surrepticiously looking up information on my own time. My students dont bother with such intellectual guile. Their honesty disarms me, and forces me to keep my teaching fresh.

At my college, it is the older students who keep going, and I'm reassured by the fact that so many of them left school in the past and then returned, sometimes decades later. Non-tiered colleges like mine are forgiving in that way. Come one, come all-the battered, the child-full, the downtrodden, the cashier, the movie hostess, the mechanic, and the baby boomers. I guess that is why I keep coming back, too. I like to help people begin again. It takes an enormous amount of courage to re-enter school as an adult, but this choice can mean the difference between the food industry and a master's degree. My student's yearning for opportunity keeps me coming back each semester. So, in their robust interest, their experiences, and their intent eyes, I return each day, hoping to change the world, one teacher at a time, specifically those serving populations that have been left behind.

So, that my friends and family is why I am a professor and why, despite the hardship, I carry on at this university, in this city, with these students. It's because I make a difference.