LOL! Just went over to the Maricopa County Community Colleges job applications site (where, BTW, precious few openings are to be found). If I’m to teach part-time, I’ll have to get into their HR system.
They’ve updated their electronic job application system. In some ways, it will be convenient, because you used to have to fill out a pages-long application over and over and over and over, one for each opening you addressed, and you had to send your transcripts with every job application. The community college district would advertise 87 gerjillion openings, and you had to jump through all these hoops for each one. Now once through will do you.
But…wow! Instead of sending a transcript, you now have to fill in a form that asks you to list every. college. course. you. have. ever. taken. No lie: check out the form.
For the love of God. Do you know how many courses it takes to get a Ph.D.? This is going to take hours!
And to make things perfect, the online part of the system doesn’t work with a Mac. When you get to the form to enter your Social Security number, it won’t let a Mac enter anything, nor will it save your data UNTIL you’ve entered the Social Security number.
My laptop (ASU’s, actually: another thing I’m going to have to buy sometime in the next nine months) has lost its connection with the modem’s router and will not reconnect. So that means I will have to do this from the campus.
To give you an idea how long this is going to take, they have an online tutorial to show you the obvious: instructions on following the instructions to fill out the forms. They estimate it will take you 15 minutes just to plow through this tutorial.
That’s for the privilege of earning $2,400 a course.
You can teach a maximum of three courses a semester, which would come to just about what I need to survive in the post-layoff world.
However…there are no ads for P/T faculty advertised.
Well, at any rate, I need to get this form filled out, which I’ll have to do this week.
I think GDU is paying $3,000 a course. That would make it possible for me to hit the $14,000 mark by teaching 3 and 2, instead of 3 and 3 with the community colleges. And GDU hires (uhmm…maybe: in better times) adjunct faculty to teach the upper-division Writing for the Professions course, which is slightly less onerous than freshman comp. On the other hand, GDU’s classes are much larger than the community college’s, and the attrition rate is lower. In a community college course, by the time everyone has dropped who’s going to drop you can end up with just 12 or 15 students, which is manageable. The last time I taught Writing for the Professions as a side job, GDU doubled the enrollment of two courses and I ended up with 80 online students! In a writing course!!!
I keep telling myself there’s nine months to find some sort of work. But it’s damned scary: there is nothing! You can’t get a job when no one’s hiring.
La Maya, who still subscribes to the local paper, said yesterday’s edition reported that to make up its enormous budget deficit, among other things the state would have to close all three universities. On the one hand it’s hard to believe anyone actually said that; on the other, this is Arizona.
Augh! There oughta be a law against three o’clock in the morning!
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
My school pays a lot less than that for part-time, believe it or not. I have had a reprieve (hopefully permanent, knock on wood) from freshman writing, but it’s taught differently now. It’s not the teacher doing all the work now! (Almost all, maybe). More workshops, portfolio grading, and so on.
That’s the going rate around here as well, but there are significantly less students in the classes.
Can you change how you grade? Do you have any latitude e.g. creative grading so you personally aren’t plowing through 80 freaking essays.
I used a diabolical method the last time I taught, people had to turn in a “reflection” paper every week on the reading. It had to be three pages, 12 pt Times new roman, 1″ page margins single-spaced (science writing)– no triple spacing to save words. They got a point for turning it in, they got 0 if they didn’t, the cumulative points were 50 percent of their grade.
Every week I would select 5 at random to read, and I would pick the best reflection to comment on in class. Reflections had to be coherent, or there would be a zero awarded for idiocy, even if they turned it in.
Net result: Everyone at least skimmed the readings before class (the point of the exercise). I only had to read a total of 15 pages each week. Good students could skip a few papers (but they do the reading anyway), bad students had a chance to get a better grade if they fell short on tests. Papers were coherent because there was a random risk of me reading them.
Writing improved markedly throughout the semester, and students loved that they could react any way they wanted to so papers also got a lot more interesting. They tested me on content, turning in rants against evolution, for example. Coherent? Yes – point awarded. Sometimes controversial ones discussed in class, with appropriate kudos for clarity in writing (I kept my evil thoughts on content to myself). Students cannot game the system, no make-ups or late papers accepted, since the point is to force them to do the reading *before* class. Anyway, all this babble to suggest creative grading so that you don’t end up making 50 cents an hour with all the grading work.
Now, the apps that want every single course you have ever taken — community colleges hire non-PhDs to teach, and that is a way of evaluating a masters person’s competency. Personally, I would call them and ask for an exemption on listing every course or write “see attached CV” in that space. The worst they can do is say no.
This is not at all related to this post but I just found an interesting article re: payroll taxes while working and taking SS. Thought it might be useful in your future calculations.
http://assetbuilder.com/blogs/scott_burns/archive/2009/03/18/taxes-on-working-senior-citizens-can-be-very-high.aspx
My thoughts are with you. I was laid off Jan 2. Had about 6 weeks warning and they did provide a decent severance. I am in a different field, an HR Executive-know how you love those! : ) Seems I am in competition with everyone to find a job right now but I am trying not to dumb down my resume. I have a 5th interview (yes, 5th!!!) with the SAME company this Friday. I am hopeful. I am 47 so I would like to work a few more years. I learn a lot from your blog. Love your ideas and openess. Perhaps within this 9 months hiring will ease and jobs will begin to be offered again. Previously my longest stint without work was 6 weeks. My thoughts are with you Lady!
@ Chance: Yah, the Ph.D. may work against me even in terms of getting one or two sections. It hasn’t before, tho’: they pay a flat rate for adjunct courses, and so they don’t have to worry about paying more for more hypereducated people.
Good strategy with the writing course! If I get a section or two, I’ll incorporate some of those ideas.
My startegy is…yes! COLLABORATIVE WRITING. Oh, how they hate it.
Actually, by the end of the semester, they’re usually happy. I give them several short essays and quizzes in the first third of the semester. By then I have a feel for which students would be “A” students if there were no grade inflation. Usually in a class of 30 or 35, there are five or six such worthies. I also try to identify students with strong organizational or “people” skills. I then divide up the class into five or six groups and assign one probable real “A” student to each group as its leader and also be sure at least one real “B” student (or, with any luck, another “A” student) goes into each group. And then I give the group leaders some real clout: they are to report any slackers to me, and I knock vast numbers of points off the perp’s grades.
This has worked pretty well to avoid the problem of one person having to do all the work. And it works well for me: I end up with five or six papers to read instead of 30 or 35. It probably works well for the students, too: for most of them, writing in the workplace will be a collaborative effort, so they get some practice at it.
@ Cathy: Wow! Five interviews… So many good applicants they can’t make up their mind.
LOL! I don’t mind HR execs: it’s GDU’s policies I’m not fond of. What they’re pulling on my associate editor, I truly do not appreciate. Unclear whether this is coming from HR, tho’: let’s remember it was an HR functionary who alerted me to it. If she hadn’t “accidentally” spilled the beans, neither of us would know what the university did.
At 63, it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll get another job. We live in a society that freely discriminates against the elderly. Listen to what is said in the media and you’ll hear things said about older Americans that today could not be spoken about minorities, women, or the disabled. People are so afraid of getting old they’ll go under the knife to fool themselves and others that they’re younger than they are. An ageist attitude permeates our culture, and it works effectively against people over the age of about 55 — particularly women. Even if I can get work, it sure won’t be a plum job like the one I’ve had. Truth to tell, I’ll be lucky if I can get work greeting people at the Walmart.
Well… Actually, it looks like I’ve got a good shot at picking up a couple of sections at a nearby community college. Probably a Walmart job would be less aggravating, and it might even pay better, hour for hour. Next week I’m meeting with the department chair.
Good luck! I hope Interview #5 is to tell you you’re hired.
@ Anne: Yipe! I’ll have to find out from my tax attorney if this is true.
The guy sure hits the nail on the head with this:
{ 1 trackback }