Rock Singer Turned Teacher Finds She’s Still on the Road

As a late ‘60s rock ‘n’ roller, Nancy Nevins learned all about life on the road and the uncertainty of the next gig.

Little did she know those same survival instincts would serve her so well in her second career in the ‘90s--as an English instructor in California’s community college system. Yet here she finds herself--having traded in a guitar for a grade book, lecturing instead of singing--but still living professional life as a series of proverbial one-night stands.

Nevins is one of a legion of degreed educators caught in the “freeway flyer” syndrome, zipping from school to school while patching together enough part-time college teaching jobs to make ends meet.

The good news for Nevins, who has a graduate degree in English from Cal State Fullerton, is that she only flies between Cypress College and Fullerton College, but the bad news is that the three freshman composition classes she teaches at those two schools are only paying her about $1,000 a month. And, just like a struggling rock band, there’s no such thing as paid benefits.

“I just started teaching three years ago and I was pretty enthusiastic,” Nevins said. “I really believed in what I was doing. I wanted to help people learn to think and to write better. Community college is especially admirable, because a lot of the people are working at the same time” they’re going to school.

The freeway flyers are victims, in a manner of speaking, of California’s budget problems. With students flocking to community colleges, the systems don’t have enough instructors to teach all the classes. Enter the part-timers.

However, as colleges strive to keep costs down, instructors such as Nevins are limited to partial-teaching loads so they don’t qualify for the fringe-benefit packages given to full-timers. An unfortunate sidelight, however, is that the part-time instructors such as Nevins are paid only for the hours they spend in class; they generally don’t have office hours, and they have virtually no say in the academic discourse at their schools.

A couple things irk Nevins about the situation. First, she wonders if the state’s well-chronicled budget crisis hasn’t provided a convenient excuse not to pay the instructors more. Second, she’s troubled that the part-timers, more than aware of the tenuousness of their jobs in the first place, aren’t willing to present a united front to press their grievances.

“I’m frustrated by it,” she said. “I think if we do stand up for ourselves, we’re going to get some respect.” As if to underscore their lack of leverage, the part-timers generally have no representation in the various schools’ faculty senates, Nevins said.

I asked Nevins if her frustration affects her classroom performance. “I give the best I’ve got, but I’m starting to feel a little frayed around the edges. If I’ve got a problem with a student, I don’t have anywhere to meet with them, one-on-one. I try to jam in 15 minutes after class or do it right there in the classroom, but I can’t sit down with them for 30 minutes. It’s a necessity with some writers who are struggling. . . . It’s easy to send them to the Writing Center (at the school) and work with a tutor, but then they miss out on your instruction. It does wear down your spirit and in that sense, it does have an effect in the classroom. You’re trying to be as first-rate as anyone there, knowing you can’t really serve these people. As a teacher, that’s what you’re trying to do--meet needs and help them do a little better.”

Maybe Nevins’ star will shine again. Her ‘60s band, Sweetwater, was moderately successful and even had a recording contract with Warner Bros. The band played at Woodstock, and Nevins parlayed her time with the band into a short-lived solo career afterward.

She said as we wrapped up our conversation that she’s a little antsy about being so vocal in her frustration.

She shouldn’t be. Academic freedom and all that.

What she’s really talking about is another entry in the Shattered Illusions category.

Everyone knows times are tough, and so anyone who’s working--even part-timers who high-tail it on the freeway from job to job--isn’t going to generate much sympathy. But the larger question Nevins raises is unassailable--that we pretend to value educators and classroom instruction and then treat some of those who teach as rather disposable commodities.

Once upon a time, you would have thought someone with a graduate degree in English and qualified to teach a college composition class would be entitled to a certain measure of respect.

Turns out, instead, that in the ‘90s in California, those instructors get a certain measure of respect, all right . . . all the respect accorded, say, a rock-’n’-roll band on the road in the ‘60s.