On rare occasions, however, I have gotten tired of the retirement routine and wished I was I was doing more than going to the grocery store and getting petrol once in a while (not to mention forcing my self to do some exercise). I have applied for a few jobs since my retirement and gotten even fewer of them. For example, I worked briefly at the Albany College of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences until I had had enough of the ultra-bureaucratic kafkaesque nature of that bureaucracy. I worked at the Albany Public Library in Pine Hills but my sixty-eight year old body would just not take the kneeling and rising necessary for that work.
Recently I received a message from a colleague informing me that Schenectady County Community College was looking for someone to teach history part-time. After thinking about it for a while—getting the job would complicate my medicaid and SNAP—I inquired about the job and I received a message of interest. I told the person looking to fill the position that I could teach, since I have taught, world history, western history, or American history.
At the same time that I applied to teach history at SCCC I applied to teach sociology at Hudson Valley Community College. I had taught introduction to sociology and sociology of religion (one of my topical interests) for several years at SUNY College of Oneonta and I liked doing both classes a lot. I had also taught social problems and social stratification during my years of college teaching.
I soon received one of those delightful form letters from the person who hired for that position at HVCC in all its brusque and banal glory telling me that they had no interest in my application for the position. One can never, of course, know why one’s application was treated in such a summary way. I suspect that HVCC’s academic bureaucrats were looking for someone with a sociology degree which I did not have (though I do have considerable graduate student coursework in sociology not to mention actual experience teaching sociology successfully). I do know that American bureaucrats do like their credentials and that the United States is probably the most credentialed society of the old British settler societies. Still, I was surprised by the rapid dismissal of my application since I had taught sociology successfully in the SUNY system for years. Apparently HVCC does not want someone who has actually successfully taught sociology classes for years. Oh well. Live and learn.
It was a different matter at SCCC. I was eventually offered a part-time teaching position. Initially I declined two classes and took one, the class in world history to 1600. So, I put in an official application online for this position. It was relatively easy, thank god, since I already had an account (not to mention years of disinterest in my application) with SCCC Human Resources.
I think the person who hired me felt that I wasn’t fully committed to taking the position and that I had some uncertainty in the back of my mind, which I have to admit I did. Teaching students who are, at best, only somewhat interested in the subject of a class they are forced to take is frankly not easy. Eventually he offered me an opportunity, a possible opportunity, to teach introduction to sociology on the same day as world history. Since I like teaching sociology more than history as it is easier to get students interested in something they find somewhat practical and I have made my course practical emphasising what sociology (and history and anthropology since I integrate these into the class) can tell us about ourselves, I accepted. And then bureaucratic reality set in.
I thought that since I had taught for nearly twenty years in the SUNY system jumping through the bureaucratic hoops again would be a breeze since SUNY had all my data on file. It wasn’t, however, easy. First off the HR bureaucrats at SCCC could not access my previous employment information. Additionally, SCCC HR wanted an “official” copy of my transcript and had a mountain of forms that I needed to fill out in order to teach at SCCC.
The person in Human Resources sent me the forms via email. My old computer, however, had trouble opening them and after the several minutes it took to open them I discovered that I could not do the application on the computer since I they were not online filling out friendly (click and the box for name etc, opens). I apparently was supposed to print them out which was a problem since I do not have a printer. I tired of buying one after another of them since they broke easily. So I told the HR person all this. I was, in turn, sent another batch of forms online that took seemingly minutes and minutes to open on my 2017 iMac.
As for the “official” transcript, I discovered that there is now a service called Parchment through which one can obtain one's transcripts. I don’t know whether Parchment is a privately owned company offering this service (rather than a service owned and run by universities and colleges) and is another one of the ways public universities help subsidise a private business but I suspect it is. What I do know is that I did my bureaucratic duty or, more accurately, I tried to do my bureaucratic duty, and created yet another of the seemingly infinite number of user names and passwords one has to create for oneself in the brave new digital world and availed myself of the service. However, once I got to the end point of the process Parchment told me the transcript would go to the registrar rather than Human Resources. So, I quit doing what I was doing on Parchment and once again contacted HR. HR told me there was a place to put in the email address of SCCC HR on the application but I could not find it. I wondered why, given that I ticked the for employment box in the first place, this box did not automatically come up somewhere down the line since I had ticked employment rather than applying to college (or some such similar jargon) in the first place. Oh the eternal mysteries of digital technology.
Long story short, I gave up and told SCCC that I was withdrawing my application. I told the person who hired me that I might be interested in working in the fall if I had more time to deal with the mountain of bureaucratic stuff via filling out the forms the old way after receiving them in the post. I suspect, however, that I cut my throat when it comes to teaching at SCCC in the future. C’est la vie.
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