Teaching is Important

Sometimes, as an adjunct, I have been offered jobs which paid by the "unit-hour"--that is, if you were teaching a typical semester class of three units, it would meet for three hours per week, so I would get paid a certain amount times three, every week. That amount has been, recently, as low as $40 x 3, for up to as much as twenty hours creating curriculum, preparing for class, grading assignments, reading revisions, responding to emails. As a writing teacher, reading a 3-to-5 page essay and making enough comments so the student would understand what to do differently could take 20 to 30 minutes. Multiply that by 30 students in a class, and each essay might take as much as 15 hours to grade.

More often than not, the amount divided by the hours I would actually spend, or have to spend, that week, would drive my pay down to minimum-wage territory. That is just shameful. We, as instructors, are required to have advanced degrees and years of experience, and yet the job itself can be valued so little. And, if we are teaching lower-division classes, we may be among the first teachers new students meet--harried, without time for questions or conferences outside class, speeding to another teaching assignment many miles away most days a week.....Wouldn't a savvy business want to compensate those "front-line" workers well, since they are not only the face of the franchise, but have a large influence on how many of those first-year students stay? It is much more expensive to have to market and otherwise recruit new students.