And, as everybody who has ever held office hours in a shared space knows, there is no privacy for personal conversations, but people keep having them, even when students are in the room.)
I've gotten behind again. Last week I read an article by Eleanor Bader, "Homeless on Campus," about how colleges and universities don't have enough services to help homeless students. She spoke to a professor who had allowed students to sleep in her office so they didn't have to drop out. This was an eye opener for me, but it paled next to a conversation I overheard last month.
I went to my math instructor's office hours to get help with my homework, and I was surprised to find that he doesn't actually have an office. He's in a "faculty workroom" during his office hours, and there were a couple of other teachers in there at the same time. I asked him why he didn't have an office, and he told me that he was an adjunct. I had never heard this word before, and it must have shown on my face, because he explained that he is part-time, only teaching 3 courses a semester (I later found out that that's full time for professors at a lot of schools that expect the professors to write stuff as well as teach). While we were talking about my stuff, another teacher came in and started talking to a teacher who was working on a computer, and that's where it got interesting. I was working through the homework assignment, but eventually I just kept my head down and listened. It seems that another teacher had just been in an accident near campus, which is bad enough, but it turns out that it was a disaster, because he has been living in his car!
I guess I made a noise or something, because everyone in the room turned and looked at me. My teacher looked at the talkers and said, "ahem," so they moved over to the other side of the (small) room and tried to keep their voices down. The first teacher said she hadn't known that he was homeless, and the one who was telling about the accident said that he lost his apartment over the summer because his car broke down and after he got it fixed there was no money for the rent. He had been showering at the fitness center on campus and so on to keep going.
I really don't understand how this could happen. I didn't want to ask my teacher, but I still wonder about it.
