Why One Adjunct is About to Quit

To accompany Dana's post immediately below, and the story on the CSU ad debacle of a few days ago, here's a post from Adjunctorium describing why the author is about to stop working as an adjunct. She's admittedly an atypical adjunct: end-of-career rather than early-, with full-time experience that she's successfully parlaying into a business of her own after losing her full-time job to cutbacks.  Also, she admits here to employing others to grade papers in her comp classes, a practice with which I have both ethical and pedagogical issues (in comp classes, providing feedback on papers is, in my opinion, a big part of what constitutes "teaching," and is also how one keeps abreast of where students are and where they need to be.  Classes that are created, taught, and, yes, graded by the same person are higher-quality than more standardized ones for exactly this reason).  And she sounds pretty burnt-out and frustrated with teaching freshman comp, which is probably a good reason to quit in and of itself.  Still, she makes some good points, especially this one:

Something called “opportunity cost” attaches to the various activities we engage. The theory behind opportunity cost is that if you could be using your time to do X for a certain amount of money but instead you spend your time doing Y for less money (or even for free), then the second activity is costing you money by occupying time that could be used more productively.

This is true of adjunct teaching, with a vengeance. The job is paid so poorly to begin with, and then so much extra unpaid labor is demanded, that the actual per-hour pay rate is down around minimum wage. . . .

For chrissake. Anyone with a master’s or a doctorate should be able to convert his or her skills into a marketable service. And if you can’t, for heaven’s sake go back to school yourself and get a marketable AA in a trade! You’ll do better in almost any low-income job than you’ll ever do teaching adjunct.

The full post is here.

P.S.  It occurs to me that if this woman and Bubba put their heads together, they just might come up with something profitable, if not, perhaps, all that pedagogically sound.  But whether anybody (at least anybody with any real power) actually wants pedagogically sound is an open question.