Drop and Add

by Rick Bailey

Eastern Technical College was not his first choice. That’s where Eliot Becker goes to teach English. As a new adjunct instructor, he’s assigned one class, “the worst class with the worst students at the worst time of day.” Eliot rents an apartment in a nearby one-stoplight farm town. For extra money he takes a job at the local grocery store and sings in an all-falsetto group at a nearby county bar. The students he teaches are under-prepared. They work, they take on debt, they struggle, they want to make good. What’s good? Can he help them? What are the odds of getting a full-time position at Eastern Tech? Can he learn to feel at home in a farm town? What does he really want?

Readers of the ARC

"I have only one issue with Rick Bailey’s Drop and Add. I didn’t want it to end!”

“Plenty of humorous release and spot-on dialogue. I read it in four sittings, eagerly coming back to it each time.”

“I love the way Eliot sweetens on life in Freeland, how he's open to it, as he's open to his students. All the lifelike, slightly eccentric small-town characters he gets to know through bagging at Pat's, or going to potato festivals, or just walking the streets—terrific.”

"The characterization of the college community is so real. I know those old fart teachers and middle-aged women. (I also know the young creative and full-hearted ones.) I know the jaded ones, the drinking ones, the fed-up ones, the ones who love “rules” and committees and the dedicated others.”

256 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 30, 2024

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

They called him Dr. Staff and Dr. Pepper. He had a file cabinet drawer in the staff room for a desk and a rarely used room in the library to met students. He was warned that half his class would be gone by the end of the term. “It’s like Gettysburg,” another teacher warns.

I have only one issue with Rick Bailey’s Drop and Add. I didn’t want it to end!! The story of a recent PhD reduced to accepting an adjunct teaching job with “the worst class with the worst students at the worst time of day,” bagging groceries and singing in a band to make ends meet, yet commits himself wholly to his work, is entertaining and inspiring. And, I want to know what happen next.

Eliot Becker finds an apartment in a small town consisting of singulares: there is ‘the cop’, ‘the’ coffee shop, ‘the’ grocery store. He can jog the length of main street in five minutes. His girlfriend can’t imagine him living there. She also is having trouble finding a job but, being a tennis pro, has work at her dad’s tennis club.

Eliot throws himself into his new culture, getting to know the locals in town. He responds to the beauty of open skies and “seas of green” cornfields. He takes time to get to know his peers and determines how to get to tenure.

Eliot loves singing with the Falsies, a band that does Oldies songs with falsetto singing, like the Bees Gees and Four Seasons. He has no compunction about taking a job at the market, starting at the bottom, bagging groceries, hoping to work up to stocking shelves. It involves him with his new community. When there is a fire, he worries because it is likely someone he knows.

Eliot’s class at Eastern Technical College is remedial composition. While some of the professors pride themselves on winnowing out those with subpar skills, Eliot is determined to not lose a student. Students respond to his teaching methods and attitude. Noticing his art skills, Eliot helps a failing student into his proper course of study. He only loses two students, including one who had to drop out for financial reasons. He is a good and committed teacher. He doesn’t take himself too seriously–after all, he proudly hangs his diploma erroneously announcing his degree as Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science and Engineering!

Eliot becomes attached to his students and to Freeland, and we know he won’t be moving on. He may lose his girl, but he has found his calling. He is in for a long haul, ready to work his way into tenure.

With humor and heart, this story of a young teacher’s dedication is a cozy and joyful read.

Thanks to the author for a free book.

[Donald Levin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Drop and Add by Rick Bailey is a terrific book. An accomplished essayist, Bailey brings to his first novel all the characteristics that make his non-fiction a joy to read: a lively intelligence, the ability to limn characters in a sentence or two, an expert sense of narrative pacing that carries the reader along at top speed, and an impressively precise eye and ear for the details that make a scene and character come alive. Bailey is a former professor who grew up in a small town, and he absolutely nails the milieus of both small-town life and academia. He is particularly strong in his depiction of the anxieties (and often-elusive joys) of teaching in a two-year college, especially for one who, like this novel’s narrator, is an adjunct instructor (the migrant workers of the academic world) desperate for a full-time teaching job. From the petty one-upmanship of faculty meetings to professors' questionable fashion choices to the concern for students' well-being that deepens over a semester, Bailey’s depiction of college teaching is accurate, witty, and at times scathing. I was sorry to see the book end. Highly recommended.

[Linda Sienkiewicz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bailey’s wry sense of humor creates a distinct and likable character in Eliot Becker. A newly minted PhD, he’s assigned to teach one class as an adjunct in a tiny rural Michigan college. He rents space above a drugstore, works part-time at a grocer’s, and sings falsetto in a local bar on weekends. The fact that he’s “Dr.” Becker becomes a running joke that follows him wherever he goes in town, his girlfriend in Detroit accuses him of settling, and his ocean-cruising mother can’t seem to grasp where he is—it’s that rural. The townspeople and students soon grow on him, but he wonders if he should aim higher. What if he never gets a full time position? What if his girlfriend quits on him? Then, when a tenured professor accuses three students of cheating, Eliot has to decide if siding with them will alienate him from the staff and thereby cut short a future in the place he’s come to see as home. Anyone who’s ever wondered about their place in life or their community should read this book. It has so much heart.

[Jill Rey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was wholly unprepared for how relatable this book would be as a doctoral student myself. But even more so the relatability to the small town and community embeddedness Dr. Eliot Becker begins to feel as he embarks on the only job that would take him, adjunct professor at Eastern Technical College. After spending five years working toward his master’s and then PhD and sending out forty-eight applications and counting for full-time work, he embraces the role he’s received at ET, and the town he calls home this semester.

Everyone sees his role, the town of Freeland, and the class he has with the worst students at the worst time of day, as a joke. But Eli quickly begins to immerse himself. As he embeds further within the town, campus, and position, he starts to see the difference he can make on these students’ lives, and the joke begins to feel personal. All the years spent in school, with his girlfriend Caroline Mercedes Drake, and leading up to this first teaching position feel insignificant in comparison to the impact he’s having in his newly minted adult life.

Author Rick Bailey so eloquently captures the small community surrounding Eastern Technical College, the students, their struggles, and even the townsfolk and surrounding faculty. Importance, both contrived and earned, is so vividly on display the reader can easily digest the underlying message and beautiful story lying underneath the words, humor, and literary satire within. Dr. Becker’s struggles, the realities of his students, and the personalities throughout the town are entirely real – wrapped tightly amidst this fun and amusing read.

[Liane · Rating 5 out of 5]

College culture is an irresistible topic for humor, and Rick Bailey’s impeccable comic timing is on full display in his novel, DROP AND ADD.

Fresh out of graduate school with a newly minted Ph.D., Eliot Becker has fantasies of engaging his students in Platonic dialogue. Instead, he’s hired as an adjunct at a technical college in rural Michigan to teach one class in remedial composition, which colleagues describe as “the worst class with the worst students at the worst time of day.” Despite living in a one stoplight town, singing at a bar, and bagging groceries to make ends meet, he connects with his students in unforeseen ways, begins to appreciate the beauty of wide open skies, and finds a place for himself in the community.

In the tradition of Richard Russo’s Straight Man and Jane Smiley’s Moo, Rick Bailey’s hilarious, astute novel skewers the excesses and eccentricities of academia, as well as the exploitation of adjunct teachers. Entertaining, inventive, and intelligent, DROP AND ADD is also an ode to the quotidian pleasures of small-town life.

[Ashley Colasanti · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not typically a genre that I would read, but I loved this book. My only wish is that it had been longer.