About a month ago I landed a job as an adjunct instructor at a local community college. So far I am really enjoying the experience. The college is a highly motivated place, and is interested in educating it's faculty (this includes adjunct as well as full time) in some pretty innovative ways. We have a book group, an educational group that is dealing with meta-cognition, and plenty of technical learning courses designed to bring everyone up to speed with the latest technology (on and off campus). All of this is FREE to anyone on the faculty, so I am taking full advantage of everything.
The problem is that I am overwhelmed by the courses I'm teaching, and woefully underpaid for the work I do. This seems to be the lot of adjunct faculty all over the country. I am fortunate that I have a partner who can carry a large part of the load while I spend this semester earning a small small amount of money for the work I do, but this can't go on forever. The problem I face is that I don't know how I'm going to be able to build on this and find MORE adjunct work (I don't know how some of these folks teach at 3 or 4 schools!) - the prep work and the grading are killing me NOW.
On the upside, perhaps some of what I'm learning in the bookgroup, educational and technology classes will translate into something more permanent in the future. And if not, well, I guess we'll just have to scale back some of our wants and needs until I can come up with something that pays better!
