adjunct pay whine

Kelley Walker kelley at interpactinc.com
Mon Mar 19 20:06:00 PST 2001


At 10:21 PM 3/19/01 -0500, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>this is not to say that adjuncts aren't treated like crap compared to
>>full time fac who make considerably more, but it is still far more than
>>that of an adjunct. your friend's "conscientiousness" was not required
>>to be an adjunct. you can get by quite well with a lousy 15 hours a week
>>per semester. no need to put that much effort into it.
>>
>>save the effort for when you get tenure b/c being a good teacher as an
>>adjunct won't get you far. which is not to say that i condone the
>>trilateral hierarchy of the academic profession either.
>
>Unlike Les (a local friend of mine I mentioned), I myself am not very
>conscientious, but I'm a very _slow_ grader all the same (I loathe this
>part of work, & I don't like teaching composition courses, mainly though
>not solely because my department demands that I require two revisions for
>each assignment & that I assign four 5-page papers per student in a class
>of 24 students!).

that may well be, but i NEVER used a multi choice exam but once! i assigned them generic questions for each weeks reading assignment, which i read, and always gave essay exams.

i know there's a steep learning curve and that you can spend a great deal of time on teaching. but, you don't *have* to. my student load was anywhere from 20-50 students, too. in the case of large classes, i did cut way back on what i did. i also had the "luxury" of teaching two intro classes back to back at colgate. my point was that, considering the amt of time one needs to spend, even at a high ball of 15 hrs per week for, say, 30 students for a 16 wk semester, your hourly wage is far better than that of a housekeeper or janitor. when i taught four courses per semester, i spent 50 hours per week working, on avg. for 16 wks and made 12,400.

that's a burn out schedule. so pull it back down to, say, 8700 for 16 wks. plus teaching 2 courses in the summer for 2200 a pop. that's 21,800 a year. STILL considerably more than a housekeeper -- and you STILL have ~ 6-10 wks off for the year! (i'm counting a couple of wks prep time and grading time even!!!)

again, it still sucks compared to the 40-75k fulltime fac tenured fac work for the minimum of say 40 wks per year, but it's better than housekeepers and janitors!



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