Why did the adjunct cross multiple roads and bridges to teach 24 classes for $30,000 a year?
Because against all advice I got a master's degree in philosophy. My only excuse is that I love the subject and I love teaching it.
This semester I drive more than 80 miles daily along Florida's Gulf Coast to teach 10 classes -- logic, intro to humanities, philosophy, comparative religion, and ethics -- at two community colleges. One of them supplies me with an office, computer, secretarial support, and most important, daily contact with other instructors. In that department I don't even feel like an adjunct until I get my paycheck.
I have been reading recent articles on the Career Network that tell me I should run my teaching as a business enterprise. I must manage my time better, these articles say, and teach more classes. To do this I would pretty much have to leave the state of Florida. One of the colleges where I teach, Okaloosa-Walton Community College, pays me $1,000 a course, more than most two-year institutions in the state, so moving to another part of Florida would not be any advantage. I would have to move someplace with sufficient wealth to support expensive private colleges for well-heeled students. Then I would market my classes to upscale buyers, double my pay, and halve my class load. I would refuse to teach for colleges that paid low wages.
But the thing is, I like teaching in community colleges. Everything about the community-college system of Florida and its dedication to teaching is why I teach in the first place. Our students are fresh out of high schools, home schools, and foreign schools. Some have just earned their GED's. Some are active duty Navy, Army, and Air Force personnel. Some are working adults retraining, upgrading their education, or "starting college finally, damn it." Many could never afford college without state-supported local community colleges. You can learn as much from these students as you can teach them.
Like my colleagues, I teach courses that are a full semester in length, a half semester, weekends, or any other configuration devised by the creative folk in scheduling. The 8 a.m. philosophy class that I teach at Pensacola Junior College, where most of the students are under 20, will not be the same as the one I teach that evening for older students at the Hurlburt Field Air Force Special Operations base.
I have never reused a syllabus. In one semester, I may teach a humanities course that meets once a week for a full semester, another humanities course that meets twice a week for a half-semester, and a third course that meets on Friday evening and all day Saturday for a month. There is no way to use the same course structure for these classes. This means constant class preparation. Talk about your creative time management -- none of us would survive if we hadn't already figured that bit out.
Adjuncts take on the subjects, the schedules, and the locations that the full-timers can afford to refuse. We take it all. Oddly enough, I would still do that if I were a full-time faculty member, just for the challenge of it. It's what makes teaching more sport than business.
One Christmas "break" I drove daily to the U.S. Army Ranger Camp at Fort Rucker to teach the instructor corps. Their schedule does not conform to any college calendar. These people are grimly determined to complete a college degree during their training breaks. I figure it cost me $100 in gas to drive to Fort Rucker, known affectionately around here as "Gator U.," for the two large alligators and various other reptiles that live in and around the classroom building. But hey, I got an autographed photo of the Australian crocodile hunter, Steve Irwin, out of that semester, when he was in town to film a segment of his show Animal Planet at the ranger camp. They asked me to come back and do another class. Those classes cost me money to teach, but I would not trade that experience for anything.
I want nothing more than to be a full-time instructor. I want to know that I will be teaching next semester, and the semester after that, and be able to support myself doing it. It would be great to be able to teach a reasonable class load (say five courses a semester) and have time to travel, enhance my education, or take half a semester off to work on an art project. Do I gripe and complain? You bet! I get peeved when I hear full-timers complain about their five classes or the 100 or so students they have to teach in a semester. Secretly, I feel superior.
I think what many of us adjuncts want is dignity in our work. We want fewer administrators telling us once a year how valuable we are, and then ignoring us completely the next day. I doubt that the state university system is made up of evil masters gleefully exploiting their workers. I bet every department head would happily hire us tried-and-true family retainers if they could. But that requires that education become as valued in the concrete as it is in the abstract.
In the meantime I have decided I will not become a adjunct entrepreneur. I will not refuse to teach at colleges that cannot pay me more and do not have the power to create new positions. There are students in those budget-stressed colleges who came from public schools that were even more lacking in dollars. How could I teach ethics and philosophy only to the highest bidder? I will continue to nudge and poke and complain because I would rather be a gadfly than a sophist.
