Last updated on November 26, 2023
Once again I’m preparing for a low-paying adjunct assignment, vowing this will be the last time I work so hard for so little money.
My base salary is $1900 per class. I spend a lot of time on these classes, updating existing materials and preparing new. Regardless of the term length, either eight or 16 weeks, I deliver the same amount of content and grade the same number of assignments. I work 20 to 25 hours weekly teaching one or two sections of a course. Three hundred and twenty hours, and probably more.
Adjunct work, therefore, pays an hourly rate of $5.94. Assume I manage to teach two courses, $3800, and “only” spend an additional five hours weekly grading papers, delivering lectures, and so on, for a total of 400 hours per term. Wow, now I’m earning $9.50 per hour, but only because the two classes are sections of the same course. (Every course requires prep work. I once had five different courses in a semester but that was for a full-time teaching assignment.)
Adjunct teaching is a dead-end. Once you’re there, the odds of a full-time, permanent job decline. The odds of a tenure-track post? You might as well play the lottery.
Trying to escape a dead-end career path isn’t easy. Reflections on my failed attempts to find a secure position in education dominate The Autistic Me archives.
In 2019, I reflected on the fading dream of a career in academia. I had given up in 2018, sure the journey was over after I had to exit the job market for family reasons. Somehow I ended up with a full-time one-year contract at a state university. There are posts from 2017, and most other years, on this career that wasn’t. At the start of 2015, I was trying to locate work, yet again. Every year or two since 1990, I chase the education career.
I tried to be realistic, even as I added the MFA to my stack of diplomas and credentials.
I’m painfully aware that academic and career choices were wrong.
To make adjustments, I made sure the master of fine arts was in film and digital media production. I tried, desperately, to focus my doctorate on digital design and rhetoric, not writing and certainly not college composition.
When we moved to Texas, I ensured my teaching credentials were in business, economics, and technology.
Yes, I should have remained in technology. I should have earned a degree in business or technology and focused intensely on a career that met my personality and my passions.
Unfortunately, the high school that hired me to teach technology classes didn’t want me to teach. They didn’t equip the lab, own the necessary software, or have enough seats for the students enrolled. Many of the students didn’t speak English and others had been placed in a coding class despite not wanting to be there. In a sad twist, COVID-19 at least ended the K12 reboot with some finality.
The lack of a fulfilling career is the single greatest source of disappointment and depression in my life.
I’m good at many things, not one or two, and I am passionate about a lot of topics. I love discussing those topics and teaching about them.
Instead, year after year, I feel worse and worse because I know there’s little hope that I’ll have a career. I’m unlikely to have a full-time job, either teaching or doing something else.
Another adjunct post teaching academic writing? No. It isn’t that I don’t love writing. I do. But, I despise academic writing. I never, never wanted to teach academic writing. Unfortunately, that’s where people with “rhetoric” degrees end up: teaching academic writing. Sometimes, I get lucky and teach public speaking.
I loved teaching business writing. I enjoyed teaching in an undergraduate economics program. I messed up the opportunity to continue adjunct teaching at a great university because I was too proud to remain at a university that passed me over twice for a permanent post. When the hiring committee passes over you twice, it’s not a good sign. Emotionally, I couldn’t move beyond a sense of rejection. There was also a general lack of support from those colleagues, but I shouldn’t have cared about them or their opinions.
Teaching in a business school within a university was probably the best job I’ve had since 1990. I should have kept quiet and remained an adjunct professor there. It paid a lot better, even as an adjunct, than any other teaching post I’ve had.
I did this to myself. I chose badly, time and time again. But, I am not working for less than minimum wage anymore. I cannot do that. That’s just punishing myself, reminding myself how little I’m valued.
Almost daily I regret not having the self-confidence to have chased a different career or at least a different set of degrees.
I belonged in science, tech, or economics. Mistakes from 30 years ago still haunt me.
Now, back to preparing for the adjunct job that will consume all my free time for the next nine weeks or so.