Adjunct Professor / Instructor
Out of context: Reply #2
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- boobs0
I've taught at quite a few different schools, in Michigan and in California, and I have to say it's quite a mixed bag.
First, if you think you're going to make $43K/semester, something must be wrong with your arithmetic somewhere. If they're paying $600/contact hour, they probably mean for the semester. I.e., if you taught a 3-credit studio course, which met 6 contact hours per week, you would get $3600 for the entire semester. Not for the week.
It would be very unlikely to get paid much more than $3000-3500 to teach a class for a semester.
I've taught at high schools, art colleges, universities, and community colleges. So, I've been around a bit in that world.
Honestly, if you get two students per class that have any real future promise at all, you'll be lucky. I mean, people that you can see have some nascent talent or insight into the process, and some ambition to improve from there. There may be another 3 or 4 students who are actually interested, and try to get better. They either haven't had their breakthrough yet, or, indeed, they may never. But they will try, and you have to count them as good students.
At least half of each class will be people who are completely misguided taking the class. Either they're from some non-art subject area, and they wanted to do art as a lark, or, and this is really sad, they will be students who have decided to major in art, but they have no real nascent skills, and no enthusiasm to develop any.
Basically, every class divides roughly into 4 groups:
Talent with effort
Not a lot of talent, but effort
Talent with no effort
Not much talent with no effortAnd the level of the school, or the community the school is in, or where the students are from doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference.
Teaching was very much a love/hate thing for me. I loved being able to deal with (some) people who were interested in the things I was, and to help them. But I hated the bare reality that most of the people were just there to mark time.