LAS
VEGAS — ON the first day of the fall semester, I left campus from an
afternoon of teaching anxious college freshmen and headed to my second
job, serving at a chain restaurant off Las Vegas Boulevard. The switch
from my professional attire to a white dress shirt, black apron and tie
reflected the separation I attempt to maintain between my two jobs.
Naturally, sitting at the first table in my section was one of my new
students, dining with her parents.
This
scene is a cliché of the struggling teacher, and it surfaces repeatedly
in pop culture — think of Walter White in “Breaking Bad,” washing the
wheels of a student’s sports car after a full day teaching high school
chemistry. Bumping into a student at the gym can be awkward, but
exposing the reality that I, with my master’s degree, not only have
another job, but must have one, risks destroying the facade of success I
present to my students as one of their university mentors.
In
class I emphasize the value of a degree as a means to avoid the sort of
jobs that I myself go to when those hours in the classroom are over. A
colleague in my department labeled these jobs (food and beverage, retail
and customer service — the only legal work in abundance in Las Vegas)
as “survival jobs.” He tells our students they need to learn that
survival work will not grant them the economic security of white-collar
careers. I never told him that I myself had such a job, that I needed
our meeting to end within the next 10 minutes or I’d be late to a
seven-hour shift serving drunk, needy tourists, worsening my premature
back problem while getting hit on repeatedly.
The
line between these two worlds is thinner here in Las Vegas than it
might be elsewhere. The majority of my students this semester hold
part-time survival jobs, and some of them will remain in those jobs for
the rest of their working lives. About 60 percent of the college
freshmen I teach will not finish their degree. They will turn 21 and
then forgo a bachelor’s degree for the instant gratification of a
cash-based income, whether parking cars in Vegas hotels, serving in
high-end restaurants or dealing cards in the casinos.
In
a city like Las Vegas, many customer-service jobs generate far more
cash (with fewer work hours) than entry-level, office-dwelling,
degree-requiring jobs. It can be hard to convince my 19-year-old
students that the latter is more profitable or of greater personal
value. My adjunct-teaching colleagues have large course loads and,
mostly, graduate-level educations, but live just above the poverty line.
In contrast, my part-time work in the Vegas service industry has
produced three times more income than my university teaching. (I’ve
passed up the health benefits that come with full-time teaching, a
luxury foreign to the majority of adjuncts at other universities, to
make time for my blue-collar work.)
Indeed,
for a young academic like myself, the job market is bleak. I’m pursuing
advanced degrees and a career in the academy despite the lack of
employment prospects, because my first and true love is learning.
However, it will take earning a doctorate — and thus several more years
of work — before I can earn a sustainable income in my chosen pursuit.
Living
these two supposedly different lives, I’ve started to see their
similarities. Whenever I’m trying to meet the needs of my more difficult
guests (“Do you have any smaller forks?” “You don’t carry wheat bread?
What kind of restaurant doesn’t carry wheat bread?”), I recite, along
with my colleagues, the collective restaurant server mantra: “I need a
real job.” The same thought gets passed among adjuncts in my department:
“I need a real teaching position. I need to publish a book.”
I
know this path takes time, and I’m trying to do it right. So why do I
still experience a great feeling of shame when clearing a student’s
dirty plate? Embarrassment is not an adequate term to describe what I
felt when those parents looked at me, clearly stupefied, thinking, “This
waitress teaches my child?”
It
is a shame I share with many of my blue-collar colleagues, a belief
that society deems our work inferior, that we have settled on or chosen
these paths because we do not have the skills necessary to acquire
something better. It is certainly a belief I held for the majority of my
undergraduate experience.
But
not all my restaurant co-workers are college dropouts, and none are
failures. Many have bachelor’s degrees; others have real estate
licenses, freelancing projects or extraordinary musical and artistic
abilities. Others are nontraditional students, having entered the work
force before attending college and making the wise decision not to “find
themselves” and come out with $40,000 in debt, at 4.6 percent interest.
Most of them are parents who have bought homes, raised children and
made financial investments off their modest incomes. They are some of
the kindest, hardest-working people I know, and after three years
alongside them, I find it difficult to tell my students to avoid being
like them.
My
perhaps naïve hope is that when I tell students I’m not only an
academic, but a “survival” jobholder, I’ll make a dent in the
artificial, inaccurate division society places between blue-collar work
and “intelligent” work. We expect our teachers to teach us, not our
servers, although in the current economy, these might be the same
people.
If
my students can imagine the possibility that choosing to work with
their hands does not automatically exclude them from being people who
critically examine the world around them, I will feel I’ve done
something worthwhile, not only for those who will earn their degree, but
for the majority who will not.
Faculty & Staff - English Department at UNLV - University of ...
english.unlv.edu/faculty/
unlvenglishgradprogram@unlv.edu | 702-895-4366; Creative Writing ... email; Bronson, Brittany email; Bussiere, Melanie email; Cantrell, Pamela: email; Carter,
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Brittany Bronson is an English instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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