Adjunct Professor / Instructor
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- d_rek
I'm curious to see if anyone here has anyone experience as an Adjunct Profess / Instructor. Specifically at a Community College level - although it can be Uni also.
A couple of questions regarding pay scale:
1) What are typical dues / fees that you are required to pay? I'm still waiting to find out the exact numbers but this one is telling me there are teacher's union and also retirement that I would have to pay into. I'm curious how the actual pay works out per semester.
2) How many credit hours on average do you teach?
3) Are you allowed to teach adjunct at other institutions? Or is there exlusivity to the college you're teaching at?
4) Any other general tips / musings about teaching adjunct?
The CC i'm courting offers $600/contact hour with a cap of 11.5 credit hours allowed to teach per semester. So a 3 credit course could potentially be 6 contact hours / week (assume this is a design studio class and not a lecture), working out to approx. $3600/week, or if it's a 12 week semester, $43k. Seems quite substantial IMO, considering i'm making $60k salaried/year right now.
- vaxorcist0
I taught at 3 different institutions as an adjunct some years ago.... approx 1999-2007 or so....
1. Only one school had dues to a union, not too much either if I remember right... I gladly paid the dues... partially due to hearing about the the high-conflict history of the administration vs part timers,
2. I always had other gigs and only taught 1 class a semester, so 3 -4 credit hours for me...
3. I knew a number of people who taught adjunct at multiple school,s but i didn't, as I wanted to keep track of my time and not be too busy to have time for my students
4. stay arms length away from committee responsiblities, and get a feeling for the department politics vs some other departments in the institution, sometimes there are "people with long toes" i.e. it can be easy to accidently step on somebody's toes when you're just trying to help get something done, somebody else might be very touchy and territorial about you intruding on their fiefdom...
Also, be aware that some schools / faculty / staff are very friendly to people with "real world" experience and some are scared/confused/ different,... they may be nervous or happy to see you...
if anyone says "you'll be back next year tenure track" get it in writing before you give up other gigs, as things can drastically change whenever administration people change....
Good luck! Cool students can make it all worth the occasional institutional hassles...
- 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.
- Llyod0
I'd like to teach some day but I'm not sure what design will actually be like by then so I don't know what I'd teach. I think to teach design you have to be young and working in an industry or you have to be a renowned expert.