I'm Doing It Wrong

I’ve often wondered how adjuncts where I work can survive getting paid for less than ten hours per week. (This is the magic number; can’t go over it or they would have to give you benefits.) Sure you get a raise every few years, and if you’ve been there thirty-some years you might be ok, but most people I know (which isn’t many) haven’t been there very long. Are they married to someone wealthy? I know some have one or two additional jobs. But others seem to get by ok with no complaints and no additional jobs.

I think I’m starting to figure it out. Some of them seem to be able to operate other classes, more than the magic number, but under some other guise and get paid for that. When I was teaching more than the magic number, the department put that two other profs were helping me teach the class so that I wasn’t “over hours.” So, they got paid for not doing anything, and I didn’t get paid for teaching. I did that for a year before I complained about it, and then they cut my hours. Recently I’ve found out in a roundabout way (an email to the entire school telling everyone to hurry up and fill out their worksheets), that there is some kind of obligatory hours that everyone can complete – and they pay you for them! This includes going to meetings, tutoring, any sort of development – basically things I have been doing for the past two years though I had no idea I could get a little extra cash for them (they will only pay you for a set number of hours 3-5/semester). Needless to say I’m a little upset that I’ve missed out on a few hundred dollars these past few years.

This is not the first time something that would be useful to me has slipped through the cracks. My boss thinks I should somehow know all of this stuff, and becomes angry when I ask about it. The other tenured prof in the department told me it’s because I didn’t go to the orientation. I found out they have not had new faculty orientations for several years due to budget cuts. I suppose sometime in grad school I should have stopped in and gone to a new faculty orientation just in case I ever got a job there. ARGH! What other opportunities am I missing?! I have no way of knowing.

On a much stranger note, I sent the grades out two days ago and have only received a single whiny email (which I'll discuss/make fun of in a later post). The silence is deafening! My partner said that maybe the other students were “drafting a formal complaint.” Then we cracked up because we realized they wouldn’t know where to begin or even what those words mean.