Why Do We Do It?
I am an adjunct English professor. This semester, the school I teach for was only able to offer me one course. I also recently learned that my temporary editing job may or may not end soon. So when I heard that another local college was looking for composition instructors, I emailed. Starting next week, I will be teaching three more courses. I will have around 100 students. If I were a university professor, this would be a full-time teaching load, earning me a reasonable salary (upwards of $40,000, probably closer to $60,000 depending where) and benefits. Instead, I net just over a grand per course, spread out over the semester. I am a bargain.
Those of us who have taught composition and intro level literature courses can easily teach them backwards in heels. We know our subject matter and can whip up lectures, writing assignments, and class activities on the spot. That’s not to say there isn’t prep work– we have plenty, especially when using new textbooks or when we have to follow a school’s lesson plan. We tend to switch things up to keep things fresh, but reading assignments we’ve read many times before still must be reviewed before class so we can lead a discussion on them. But the most work comes from grading essays and commenting on drafts. A short stack of essays, especially ones that need a lot of work, can easily eat up a weekend.
I don’t slack on my teaching duties. It’s not like the students get a discount because my salary is low.
Our work doesn’t end at the end of a semester. Students ask adjuncts to write letters of recommendation, which we generally do happily. Adjuncts catch students cheating and have to follow the college or university’s policy for dealing with it, often taking several hours of the adjunct’s personal time to resolve or enforce (which we do, but not generally happily. I’m dealing with a situation from fall semester now and it’s less than fun). Adjuncts have to attend meetings and participate in department projects alongside full-time faculty. Adjuncts get emails all weekend and evenings, some that can be answered quickly, some that require reading and commenting on a draft or some other unexpected time-consuming thing. After our students are no longer our students, we get emails asking for help on papers for other classes, speech topics, and even master’s theses. We help gladly, mainly because being someone’s teacher (especially of English, I dare say) is forever. It’s every day, like being a police officer or nurse. Does a physician see someone choking in a restaurant and think “Eh, I won’t help. It’s my day off”?
So why do we do it? Why do we take on the responsibility? Why do we allow ourselves to exploited, underpaid, and under-appreciated by our institutions?
I cannot speak for all adjuncts, but having done it for 9 years and knowing many other adjuncts, I have a couple educated ideas.
Firstly, I think that we simply love to teach. We love teaching so much that we would rather teach and be broke than do something else that might earn us more money but might leave us unfulfilled. Many of us (including myself in the past) have full time jobs but teach a class or two to stay at least partially in the classroom or we might volunteer our time mentoring underserved youth or tutoring.
Another reason we continue to adjunct teach is that we can’t find other work. It could be the economy, it could be that we’ve been typecast as educators, it could be that employers fear that we are overeducated (which, ironically, might price us out of the job or might make an employer believe we’ll quit the moment anything better comes along, which makes them not want to spend the time and money hiring and training us), it could be that we appear incapable of holding down a full time job (if there aren’t any on our resumes) or it could be any combination of these factors, but job-searching is certainly a bitch out there.
For the time being, I’ll be working three jobs, but I’ll do my best to remain sane and to write.
