An old Chronicle of Higher Education article on why the use of adjunct faculty hurts students feels very timely to me as I prepare to begin the fall semester. I'm guilty of most of the things this article describes, especially numbers 1, 2, 5-7, and 9, but perhaps "guilty" is too strong a word, since the crime I accuse myself of is nothing worse than pragmatism and self-preservation.
As a part-time English instructor with 10 years of experience, I make about $38.00 per contact hour. This is a pretty good adjunct wage; I've made as much as $45.00, at the community college an hour down the road, and been offered (and turned down) as little as $19.50. $38.50 may sound like a good hour's pay, but the hidden kicker is that phrase "contact hour." Each contact hour represents an hour a teacher spends in the classroom: in my case, four per week for a four-credit course. This means that if I spend an additional four hours per week making up assignments, reading, grading, and keeping office hours, my wage has gone down to $19.00 per hour, less than I pay the excellent woman who cleans my house. If I spend an additional eight hours, my wage goes down to $12.67 per hour.
I have 22 students per class. I teach freshman composition, which means that at least four times during the semester, I have a week in which I have to grade 22 essays. It takes half an hour to do a decent job on an essay, reading carefully enough not to miss important errors and taking the time to write coherent and thorough comments from which students can actually learn.
That's 11 hours of grading.
Say that during that week I am also in class for four hours.
And that I spend another hour preparing lessons and handouts (I've been doing this a long time; it probably takes most instructors more time than that).
And that I meet with one student for an hour.
And that I spend another hour checking homework and recording grades.
That's 18 hours. For which I have earned $8.44 per hour.
Did I mention that until a few years ago, the cap was not 22, but 29, students in writing classes? That I have had as many as 31, when the department processed override requests without consulting me? You do the math; I can't bear to.
This Law of Dwindling Hourly Returns means that I rarely give each student paper the half hour it deserves. Whenever I sit down with a stack of essays, I am conscious of the balance I want to strike between giving my students a fair shake, and giving me one. I've been known to grade with a timer on: 15 minutes per, and on to the next. Once, many years ago, under the pressure of teaching too many classes at too many colleges, I graded 18 essays in under an hour. Everybody got one illegible comment per page, and a B. That was a personal teaching low point, but sometimes when I look up from Essay Number Ten and note the passage of the hours, I wonder what happened to that speedy and careless young woman, and why I can't seem to conjure her up anymore.
The saving grace is that attrition is terribly high at the community college level. My classes always start out fully enrolled, but only 13 or 14 people are still participating by week six or seven. It's not my teaching or my breath that drives them away; community college students are often poorly prepared for college, and usually have other responsibilities, like children and full-time work. If a student makes it a third of the way through the term, I feel some responsibility for them, and will do what I can to pull them through. Before that, they're on their own, and I'm frankly relieved when a few--or a bunch-- drift away.
I do periodically become fed up, and start thinking about finding another line of work. But I like a lot of things about teaching, including my students. And the flexible hours suit me, as well. I only go to campus when I have a class to meet, and since I started teaching on-line a year ago, that means never. I get to work in the comfort of my own home, on my own schedule, which I have always liked better than having set hours. Now that I'm a mom, I like it even better.
I'm a good teacher. But I can rarely be as good a teacher to my students as I would like, because the economics of part-time teaching just don't reward the investment. As it is, I often put in more time than I should, and I know I'm not the only one. The rise in the use of adjunct faculty has probably been less devastating to educational quality than it might have been, because so many of us take pride in our work and want to do the best we can for our students, and short-change ourselves as a result.
It's a new semester coming up, and although I am tweaking a few assignments and thinking about how to better teach a couple of key concepts, most of my prep work so far has focused on developing strategies for preserving boundaries around my time and reducing my grading load. It's too bad I have to think that way, but I won't apologize for it. I do the best I can for my students without using myself too badly, and I hope that a broken system will someday be fixed.
Posted by Su Penn at August 11, 2003 11:10 PM | TrackBack