Category Archives: Articles

These are various articles/essays I’ve written over the years. Most of them have never seen the light of day.

Is Your Brain a Time Bomb?


Sensitivity to Light



Headaches Become a Fact of Life



Swiss Cheese Memory



Sleep Disruption



 Nobody Can See the Mark



It Forces You to Change Your Life



It Also Changes Your Personality




Your Brain Becomes a Time Bomb




Your Health Becomes an Uncertainty Forever



You Slowly Gain Acceptance and Adapt






To Governor Haslam on Education

Dear Governor Haslam:

I’m quite certain you personally will never read this letter, but since you have taken over the helm of this great state, I feel compelled to write you anyway.  Please, allow me to be clear–this is not a partisan attack on your principles or values, and this is not meant to be a politically charged diatribe, either.  Instead, this letter is merely meant to illustrate the state of the state, so to speak, in terms of our educational system.

Please, also allow me to be clear that I love this state, especially East Tennessee.  This is my home, and when I finished graduate school, I chose to move back to this area to be a part of this community.  There were other opportunities in other regions open to me, but I chose to utilize my skills for the people of East Tennessee.  I am a professional educator, having taught for 13 years at the collegiate level, and I wanted to teach here because I felt it was my duty.  However, at this point in my career and in my life, I cannot see a rational argument for continuing in this profession in this area much longer.  My reasons for feeling like this profession is a dead-end emanate from the absurdly low monetary compensation we receive and the deplorable working conditions under which we are required to function.

On the monetary level, for 13 years my salary has remained basically stagnant and is lower than the salaries of most fast-food managers.  During this same time, my rent, electric bill, groceries, and fuel costs have all risen by at least 30%.  Real-world, real-life inflation has consumed every penny and then some of disposable income I once had.  Additionally, I’m saddled with $60,000 worth of student loan debt that I feel will never get paid off because I simply don’t earn enough money to afford the monthly payments.  In order to hold this position, I must have at least as much education as an accountant, an engineer, or an architect, and in obtaining that education I accrued as much debt, but the opportunity to pay off that debt is not equitable.  To me, this is an unsustainable system, and at times, I feel like a liar and a hypocrite for telling students that education matters.  I hold bachelor’s and master’s degrees, yet my education has done little to improve my economic conditions.

In terms of our working conditions, I am deeply frustrated by the quality of students we receive at the college.  Since the inception of the Hope Scholarship, we have been overwhelmed by a throng of kids who are not prepared for college.  These students have swelled our class sizes to nearly double the optimal student-teacher ratio.  There is substantial data to support the claim that this ratio is one of the biggest factors in educational quality.  When classes are overcrowded, the ones who suffer the most are the serious, sincere students who truly want an education to better their lives.  We get so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of students that we become incapable of providing them with the time and attention they deserve.

Those of us who are serious, committed professionals are frustrated by all the hindrances to serving our students.  There have been times in my career when I have gotten to teach courses with an optimal ratio for writing classes of 15:1, and in those courses, I was able to provide my students with detailed one-on-one instruction to work specifically on their personal writing issues.  This mode of instruction is much more effective and much more fulfilling.  Once the ratio gets above 20:1 for a writing course, most instruction becomes generic and abstract, and the instructor is limited in how much he or she can learn about each individual student.  In my experience, most of us truly care about delivering a positive experience to our students, and most of us want to contribute to society by improving the lives of those students, both traditional and non-traditional.  However, when our classes are overrun with people who neither want to be there nor are prepared academically, our jobs become impossibly frustrating.

Also, the sheer volume of hours we put in is part of the difficult working conditions.  During each semester, I have no time for anything other than my job.  On good weeks, I put in 60 hours and work 6 days.  On bad weeks, those numbers can reach 80 hours and 7 days.  Rarely, extremely rarely, do I work less than 60 hours.  As a divorced man who lives 500 miles from his children, I cannot make trips to spend time with my children throughout the semester because I cannot spare the weekend from grading.   I cannot be the father my children deserve because of the demands of this job.  Among ourselves, many of us grumble about not having time for anything or anyone other than our jobs.  If the monetary compensation mirrored the workload, we might see the sacrifices as worthwhile, but since our salaries hover just above the poverty line, it’s difficult to find justification for losing months on end from our families.

This human toll of teaching is by far the worst aspect.  I didn’t enter the profession with delusions of becoming wealthy.  I knew my salary would be lower than many other professions.  I chose to teach because I wanted to give something back to my community.  Now, 13 years later, that feels like a terrible mistake.  If I had known that I would have to make so many sacrifices for this job, I would’ve done something else for a living, and my fear is that over time, fewer and fewer serious-minded, dedicated professionals will gravitate to this career because of the overwhelming demands placed on us with too little in return.  As I speculate on the future, I imagine an educational landscape dominated by semi-skilled, quasi-professional people who work the job much like most fast-food employees work theirs, with no sense of quality or duty.

There was a time when I loved my profession.  I woke up every day excited to go to work, and I felt as if my contribution to society was meaningful, important, and crucial.  Now, I feel as if I have wasted my life.  Education has become so devalued that most of my students view it as an obstacle to their careers, instead of a bridge.  Perhaps education is not important.  Perhaps our state can move into the economy of the future without a literate workforce.  Perhaps it was merely naive and idealistic of me to believe that giving back to the community was a sincere contribution.  All I know for certain is that under the current circumstances, I do not have many more semesters in me.  I am completely and utterly exhausted.

If the state is serious about improving the educational system in Tennessee, it needs to find a way to bring salaries up to levels that are equitable to other skilled professions.  Money from the Hope Scholarship program needs to be redirected into K-12 to prepare students better academically.  Until that foundation is fixed, the money is mostly being wasted.  And the demands placed on those of us in the classroom need to be lessened.   As the system stands, dedicated teachers are being used up way too early in their careers, and if this continues, the quality of instructor in the classroom will only continue to erode.

Thank you for your time and contemplation on this matter.  My hope is that the system will be improved, not by adding more layers of bureaucratic oversight and more hours of unproductive paperwork but by fixing the core issues of inequitable pay and substandard working conditions.


D. A. Adams

Cultural Rebellion

My extreme disdain for Beat culture goes far beyond the obvious lack of talent in most of the work.  No, I truly detest the rebellious course proposed by most Beat artists.  Don’t misunderstand; I’m all for cultural rebellion.  I’ve spent the better part of my life refusing to assimilate into the cultural norms before me, but Beat culture has turned rebellion for many aspiring young artists into a process of self-destruction that simply leads to addictions, poverty, homelessness, and sometimes even death.

Beat writers such as Kerouac, Bukowski, and Ginsberg glorified and glamorized lifestyles at the lowest end of the economic scale.  In their writings, you can easily find passages in which these writers lambaste the middle-class; denounce money, ridicule employment within the establishment; uphold living as a hobo; and acclaim the wondrous benefits of narcotics.  I understand well enough that these writers came out of the Fifties, a paranoid and stuffy period, and that their version of rebellion arose from the need to break free from repression, but that fact does not excuse these people, who mostly came from affluent middle-class backgrounds, for a distorted message.  Granted, their intentions may have been good, but in this case, the road to ruin is indeed paved with those intentions.

There are problems within America’s middle-class, problems which have existed for the better part of a century.  Money and the pursuit of obtaining it can blind many people to the important things in life: love, family, and morality.  Suburban life has evolved into a bland, cookie-cutter landscape in which glitz and flash have replaced quality.  This insular existence began as an escape from ethnic diversity within urban areas and has become a form of rigid social stratification, a way of isolating the well-to-do and their tax-base from the undesirables of the inner-city.  As a result of taxes being taken out of the metropolitan areas, serious cultural erosion has gripped many urban environments.  For example, in Memphis where I went to college and had the opportunity to teach, the most affluent suburb is Germantown, and its high school is a model for academic and athletic success.  However, within the city limits of Memphis, it was not uncommon to find schools without air conditioning, never mind something as elaborate as a computer.  While the inner-city suffers, the suburbs thrive in pseudo-isolation.  I say pseudo because the suburbs couldn’t exist without the industrial and commercial centers of the city itself.

These problems with middle-class ideals are very real and deserve attention, but the problems of being poor in a capitalist society are, I believe, much more pronounced and dangerous.  When a person is poor, mere survival becomes a challenge because everything requires currency.  Even the homeless must pay money for food and clothing, unless they happen to find or steal these necessities.  As most people know, the real paradox of capitalism is that it takes money to make money.  As money for clothing and grooming decreases, opportunities to find gainful employment also decrease.  As employment opportunities decrease, frustration and depression increase, which lead to more and more problems.  Thus, the simple, often taken for granted act of survival becomes a challenge.

Among the lower classes, drugs, alcohol, violence, sex, and unwanted pregnancies are epidemics.  Literacy, mathematical ability, and other basic educational necessities are not considered as important as toughness, strength, and bravado.  Growing up in an impoverished, rural community in the Appalachian Mountains, I often heard people say that book learning and school were wastes of time.  In Memphis, those sentiments were echoed by many of the poor I met.  As an educator and a writer, I can’t describe my frustration at seeing friends, family, and neighbors reject education and literacy.  The result of this rejection is an embracing of lowbrow culture such as professional wrestling and talk shows like The Jerry Springer Show.  These forms of entertainment glamorize violence, sexual perversion, and ignorance.  It could be argued that lowbrow culture is merely a mirror of society, but as the “art” forms continue to glamorize the problems, people within the lower classes gain a sense of vindication at having these problems.  If people on TV are like this, it must be okay for me to be like this too.  The problems compound because they are no longer viewed as problems at all.

In their rawest forms, the Beats would have you believe that this lifestyle should be an aspiration.

Cultural rebellion is a natural part of the human psyche.  Without it, we have no progress.  Without it, we are still scavengers at the water-hole picking flesh from the kills of predators.  Without it, we do not land a probe on Mars.  We as a species are driven by a desire to change things, to make things better than they were, and that desire is the crux of cultural rebellion.  Rebellion of any kind should come from a need to improve conditions, but the rebellion proposed by the Beats does not lead to a better way of living or a better way of viewing the world.  In this way, it cannot truly be called a rebellion at all.  It should be viewed as a disenfranchising and debilitating pestilence on society.

In our society, this culture of money and greed and affluence and immoral behavior, a true rebel should strive for something truly rebellious.  Anyone who claims to be rebellious should not strive to descend the socioeconomic ladder.  No, a rebel should simply strive to be a decent person, someone who is nice and kind and considerate to everyone he or she meets.  This attitude would shock the hell out of people.  This behavior would indeed be viewed as bizarre.

In my youth, I watched friends who thought themselves to be rebels willingly place the modern-day shackles of lower-class life on themselves.  We were born poor, and they in their rebellions quit school, partied, worked menial jobs, and lived in slums, permanently arresting themselves in the lifestyle they thought they were rebelling against.  I say that a true rebel in the lower classes is the person who does not use alcohol or drugs, refuses to be left out of education, abstains from sex until after having a career.  Those people are the ones who are truly not doing what they are supposed to be doing.

In the middle-class, I say that a cultural rebel is not the person who rejects the establishment and aspires to be poor.  Rather, these true rebels are the people who embrace substance over image.  These people reject the insular suburbs and reach out to the inner-city, trying to improve the lives around them instead of making their lawns the greenest in the cul-de-sac.

The Beats argue that the way to improve the middle-class is to reject it and become poor, but there is nothing virtuous and compelling in becoming disenfranchised.  Poverty breeds problems that are powerful and crippling to the soul.  Depression hangs on the lower classes like smog to an airport.  Addictions destroy families in any class, but in the lower classes, the addictions I have witnessed become amplified by depression, a lack of money to support the addictions, and the basic need to survive.  Cultural rebels should not embrace this lifestyle as something grandiose and beautiful.  Cultural rebels should be truly rebellious.  They should spend their lives trying to do what very few people in this country strive for anymore and that is to improve other people’s lives, not their own, because rebellion has never been anything except an attempt to make the world and the human existence better.