Chris

“I really love teaching and it's been great, but sometimes I just get really frustrated,” says Chris Nordquist.

Chris has been a part-time PCC instructor for 12 years, working out of the Newberg Center. She teaches mythology, poetry, and other literature classes—but the pandemic has caused new challenges in her teaching and her ability to earn a viable income.

For one, she misses her colleagues. Chris lives in a rural area. Working remotely means she goes for stretches without contact with her coworkers. “You can't just drop in on the water cooler,” she laughs.

And her interactions with students have changed. Many students, for various reasons, prefer to keep cameras off during a Zoom class. Chris understands that, and yet she thrives on seeing her students’ faces in class.

“You read your audience, you’re constantly receiving feedback and playing off that,” she says. “So when students don't have a camera on, you don't know if they're even listening, if they're with you, if they're just mad or having a bad day.”

She describes students who came to class from dentist or hairdresser appointments. While she appreciates their effort to attend, she says it feels like checking a box. Zoom allows us all to show up without really being there, to multitask our “real lives” while nominally attending class.

“They’re there but not really there,” she says.

The Zoom format has also created changes in her class community. In a literature course, where Chris regularly encourages disagreement and “intense conversations,” the Zoom chat became a place to vent and argue. Chris says some class members used the chat to go beyond intellectual disagreement and pick personal fights.

“It would not have been as heated if it had been in person. I’m sure it was because of the chat feature,” she says.

Adjusting to the technology has been a major change in the last two years, but not nearly as difficult as the financial adjustment. Like many part-time faculty at PCC, Chris gets hired for classes each term. Every three months, she finds out if she has work. With low course enrollments due to the pandemic, she’s struggling to make ends meet.

Several of her classes have been canceled last-minute, something she laments:

“You really get to know your students, build a rapport and they're excited about taking you again, and then the last minute to have the rug pulled out from them, they have to scramble and find some other class. That's been really heartbreaking and discouraging,” she says.

And the impact on teachers? Chris doesn’t hold back; like many adjunct faculty, she believes the current adjunct system is flawed. She has a doctorate in English literature, she says, and no job security, no savings, and no retirement options.

“I get treated like nothing,” she says. “It's just disheartening to think I’ve given my whole life to this and I’m going to be kicked to the curb.”