Comp Droids: A Lament
Jeffrey W. Klausman

Cary Nelson offers a despairing view of English departments filled with
"comp droids" who"beep and whir and grade, that's all."
Joseph Harris, "Meet the New Boss"CCC September 2000

You walk the halls in silence, year after year,
through basic writing and freshman comp-
no other assignments, no other duties-
for half a wage and the corner of an office.

I've seen you at four p.m. straining
with canvas book bags stuffed with papers
as voices call to you from behind:
"When will we get our papers back?"

And I wonder what you'll do in the years to come.
Will you lay down your books, put away
your grading, and rise up with fresh eyes
in search of something else to do?

Or will you walk always in gray light,
belonging to someone else-someone's
mother or teach or ex-lover-
responding to the demands they make?

The college will not care. It will
grind you under its hull like a ship
crossing the desert toward the ocean,
riding on the ridges of your spine.

You are the silent, faceless army,
the gray strangers that haunt our halls
and show up each year on the annual schedule
at regular as rain.

It's a Gun
Robert Sward

I confess: I used to hear of children bringing guns to school, and tended to think, that may happen in high school, but I'm safe. I teach at a community college.

What I learned is that what happens in one part of one's community is eventually going to happen in another. Community college students arrive in the classroom from industry, from jail and, of course, from high school. Yet faculty, in my experience, are asked to work with little or no knowledge of who is in their classroom and to do so with minimal input or support from the Administration.

Five days after one teenage student came to my English class with a semi-automatic handgun, I happened to pick up a copy of our campus newpaper and recognized his name. The paper went on to descrie an "incident" in which a College classroom had been staken out and campus police prepared to arrest an armed man--namely, my classroom, my student! It was only after I read the article, a week or so after my life and the lives of my students were endangered, that I learned the news.

The truth is, I had objected to the student's coming to class late and, when he grumbled, asked him to step outside and told him to go home. What I didn't know is that he was armed and had come to my classroom after robbing another student in the campus washroom.
By the time the police came, he was gone.

The lives of twenty students were put in danger, yet the Administration kept me outside the loop. Following the incident neither the campus police nor the Administration made any attempt to inform us of what had occurred.

The poem "It's A Gun" is loosely based on this incident. What the poem does not talk about is the lack of communication--the arrogance and thoughless complacency--of an Administration that supports itself financially on the backs of Adjunct faculty.

Sara's got on earphones.
I make out Mariah Carey
singing, "I want you,
I need you,
don't leave me.

Class begins.
"Okay, Sara, I say,
"tune her out.
"_Never be alone at night,
if you're lonely, love will be there_," Carey sings.

Sara turns it up loud, then takes off the phones.

Marco, New Yorker,
walks in late,
begins yelling from his seat
at some guy at the door
who's shaking his fist,

but Marco isn't leaving,
he's staying put, and his friend,
clearly pissed, won't let up. "Mutha..."
waves and yells he's been robbed,
wants his money back.

"Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. Uh huh... "Marco says.

What are we on about today? I've got this
lesson plan. I mark the guy late.
"Cool it, Marco, you're late again," I say.
I still don't know he's got a gun.

"Let's talk about this outside,
and the other kid disappears
and Marco steps outside
and I tell him to go home.
Actually, he's written this B+ essay

about "murder and bang bang,"
how home was a front stoop in Manhattan,
how he's here for his safety,
how he can't get used to "San-ty Cruz,
he misses all that bad company.

"Teach," he says, "I'm not goin' home."

I'm pissed and he's telling me to cool it.
"You don't know what I got, he's saying.
He's right. I don't know. Then the police
are all around us; turns out
the room's barricaded. How did I know?

Murder and bang bang. Mariah Carey singing,
_"It's a gun, it's a gun._"