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adjunct teaching

Surprise! Money happens again

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Yesterday while I was laboring through a client’s large project, in comes an e-mail from the dean of academic affairs at the college where I’m teaching adjunct for handsful of pennies and no benefits. She reminds me that I’m supposed to make an appointment for web development coaching with one of their online curriculum staff to discuss the feature writing course I’m supposed to teach online in the second eight weeks of fall semester (done that—great experience! This place has the most incredible staff!). In the boilerplate list she’s sent is a mention that I’m supposed to be paid for the course during the development phase, half upfront and half when development is done.

Huh?

Well, being a veteran of GDU, I figure that means they’re not going to pay the usual $2,400 for the three-credit course. This looks a great deal to me like a reason to cut the pay for teaching online: if you don’t have to show up in the classroom, why should you be paid the $50 an hour one gets for entertaining students on the campus?

I need that $2,400. This fall I’ll only be teaching two sections, and the full pay for both will not be enough for me to get by on comfortably. Any less, and I’ll be in deep trouble.

The main reason I dropped back from three to two sections next fall was that teaching six sections this year plus freelancing and blogging will put me over the Social Security earnings limit. The way I understand what two Social Security factotums have said is that to extract the 50% tax on income that exceeds the limit, the government withholds an entire SS check. From that, the amount they figure you owe is extracted. You get the rest back…but not until the following January!

Well, I can’t do without a Social Security check for a month, much less for several months. That’s a pretty stiff penalty for daring to earn a living.

However, what I’ll earn from teaching two sections will barely keep beans on the table. There’ll be no more frolics at J. Jill for the rest of the year…or even at Goodwill. And one unplanned expense, even a minor one, will dig into the emergency fund.

So, it’s going to be a difficult balancing act. I can’t do without full pay for one of the two three-credit courses I’m slated to teach. This news from the dean promised to knock me off the highwire.

Forthwith, I e-mailed to inquire: Soooo… How much less are they going to pay for the course?

They’re not going to pay less at all. What she was saying is that the community college district pays adjunct faculty for their time time to develop a course! And they pay the entire amount of the contract stipend for teaching the course—not instead of but on top of the pay for teaching. In other words, I will earn twice as much for teaching the online course as I would have for teaching an ordinary face-to-face course.

Holy mackerel! When we say “money happens,” we’re not kidding. This summer, instead of having no income except Social Security, I’ll have enough extra to carry me through the months when utility bills hover in the stratosphere. It’s far from what I’ve been earning teaching three sections, but it’s just about the amount extra that I figured I’d need to get through the summer without diving into the emergency fund.

And averaged out over the whole year, it in fact does provide annual pay equivalent to teaching six sections.

You realize how unheard-of this is. GDU would never in a million years pay anyone, especially not adjunct faculty, a stipend for “developing” a course. That’s course prep—it’s part of the job. It’s why I try to get each semester’s prep done before the previous semester ends. When I built the West campus’s first online course in “writing for the professions” (read: “freshman comp for juniors and seniors”), I spent the entire summer working for no pay. Three months of eight-hour days for zero dollah. And zero appreciation, too. Not so much as a f***-you-very-much. That was one of many events and conditions that led to my deep disaffection for My Beloved Former Employer.

I’d figured to spend two weeks slapping the course together and then table it. In fact, since the course doesn’t start until October—it’s an eight-week session—I planned to put off working on it until the fall and use this summer for building FaM and writing a book. This development changes that: if the district is really going to pay me (!) to prepare this course, I suppose I’m going to have to do a decent job of it. That means (gasp) actually work.

Of course, it also means I’m going to crash through the earnings limitation.

Upon reflection, I wonder why I’m worrying about that. Who cares if Social Security withholds a munificent $900? Over $16,000 is sitting in my emergency fund.

On the one hand, I don’t want to diddle away that money on living expenses. The budget is so tight that one good-sized house repair or car repair bill will gouge a hole out of that emergency fund. That stash is there to cover a major emergency that puts me in a position where I can’t work: a car accident, a heart attack, a stroke, cancer…all highly likely at this time and in this place. It is, in effect, a year’s worth of disability insurance.

On the other hand, the emergency fund has grown by almost $2000 since the first of the year, because I’m not spending all my income. I can afford to forego a month’s Social Security “benefit.” (Some of us would call that a “paycheck,” it being a payback of earned wages confiscated over a lifetime in the salt mines.) Most of the money will be returned in January, anyway. Even if it’s not returned, it won’t make much difference.

Money happens. And it’s happening at a good time—when I need it.

New refinement on Year 1 retirement strategy

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So far—all of two months into this new Bumhood adventure—I’m doing so well at staying on budget and living within my apparently reduced means that I’m thinking next fall I should teach two sections instead of three.

The community colleges pay $2,400 per class. Six times $2,400 comes to $14,400. Contrary to predictions, Social Security did not raise its earnings limitation this year: it remains at $14,160. While I certainly can afford to sacrifice half of $240 for the privilege of earning slightly more than a sub-poverty wage, I can’t afford the way they expunge it from your pocketbook. As soon as SS find out that you’re over the limit, they take away an entire month’s payment. From that they withhold the amount they think you owe them. But they don’t give the rest back until the following January. So, that’s $1,000 that goes away for months, maybe as long as a year.

My net on one section is $2016. True, it’s twice as much as a thousand bucks, but prorated over four months, it’s only $504 a month.

Meanwhile, I have over $16,000 residing in savings now. Because I started with a $14,500 cushion and so far have not spent anything like as much as I expected, the “cushion” keeps accruing feathers. Every month, another chicken’s worth of feathers gets stuffed in there. In addition, The Copyeditor’s Desk has $2,000 remaining to pay out in “dividends.”

When SDXB said you don’t need anything like as much as you think to live well in retirement, he wasn’t kidding. At the moment I’m coming nowhere near using all the money I budgeted to survive. That will change in the summer, when utility bills rise into the stratosphere, but by then enough will have accrued from the monthly underruns to cover those extra costs. It’s amazing. The guy is right: money happens!

Standing down off one section in the fall presents several sterling advantages:

1. Bureaucratic hassle avoidance. Not having to deal with Social Security over an earnings limit violation is worth a great deal. After the endless fights and negotiations with ASU’s HR department, the shape-shifting COBRA monsters, and now Medigap insurance predators, I have developed a bureaucrat flinch reflex.

2. Reduction of taxable income. Of course, it’s not enough to drop me into the lowest tax bracket. However, as it develops, Medicare, Medigap, and COBRA premiums are regarded as tax-deductible medical expenses, as are my long-term care premiums! Those will add up to at least $3600 this year. That’s 13 percent of an income cobbled together with Social Security and five sections. And that will make those costs deductible, even if I do earn a small wage from the S-corporation this year.

3. Brief reprieve from freshman comp. Since I’ll be teaching one section of magazine feature writing next fall, taking on just two sections will leave me with only one section of composition to have to struggle through. If I’m lucky and the section is 102 instead of 101, then I’ll have only three papers to have to grade for that course.

4. Hugely reduced course load. The feature-writing course is an eight-week online section. The chair has already agreed to make one of the comp courses he expects me to teach next fall an eight-week session, so that at any given time I’ll only be teaching two sections. If he stands by that, then I could end up with one composition course in the first half of the semester and the feature-writing course in the second half.

Hot dang! This would get the dratted comp class out of the way in eight weeks. The feature-writing course is online, and so for the rest of the semester I wouldn’t have to go to campus at all. At 19 miles per gallon, that represents a nice little saving in gasoline. And it sure represents a pretty saving in workload.

While I enjoy meeting with the young people and watching them bounce around, freshman comp is a discouraging class to teach. Especially in the community college, a good portion of the students struggle with serious learning problems and ESL issues. There’s very little you can do to help them. Really, in one semester there’s nothing you can do to make up for the shortcomings of 13 years of third-rate education, and there’s nothing you can do to change the way a dyslexic young adult’s brain is wired. You can’t teach them in 16 weeks what they didn’t learn in 13 years of K-12 training. It’s frustrating, and in many students’ cases, it’s just downright sad. So…any time I can get out of a section, I’ll be happy to do it.

Now, this scheme has some significant disadvantages, too.

1. Summer bills will deflate the cushion by about $1,200. This amount would be recovered by October if I’m reaching three sections.  By the end of December, I would have plenty of cash to carry me over the winter break: barring a huge unexpected expense, around $4,800.

However, in reality that’s way  more than I need to survive for a month of unemployment. With one fewer section to teach, I’ll still be back in the black by the end of October. The amount accrued to make it through winter break would than be about $3,300, more than enough to get by when utility bills are low.

2. Boredom factor. Teaching two sections will not give me enough to occupy my time. I’ll have to come up with new things to do.

That may not be a bad thing. 😉

3. Boss annoyance factor. The departmental chair thinks he has me for three sections this fall. He won’t like having to hustle up someone else to teach a section of composition on short notice. Given the precariousness of my position, I hesitate to annoy this guy or bring myself to his attention in any negative way.

I really can’t make this decision until I get my tax forms. When ASU was jacking us around with furloughs, I changed the number of exemptions on my withholding, as to retain enough income to  live on. I never changed them back. Then at the end of the year I changed the amount withheld for Arizona’s rip to the minimum amount, so as to avoid having any more money gouged out of RASL and my vacation pay than absolutely necessary. This means that instead of having a refund coming, I may have to pay taxes this year.

Tax Lawyer has the mountain of paper I shipped to her office. It’s an incredibly complicated mess. She said she expects to have the returns ready the middle of this week. So it will be several days before I know whether I’ll have to pony up a chunk of the cushion to the government. If a lot of that money goes away, obviously I can’t take a chance that there won’t be enough to support me through 2010.

The longer I delay telling the departmental chair that I won’t be teaching three sections in the fall, the larger the headache for him. Hence, the greater the Boss Annoyance Factor.

However, the community colleges are not the only places to find freelance teaching work. Because I’m experienced in developing online courses, the fact is I can teach for any college in the nation. With the extra time freed up by dumping that third section in the fall, I could hustle up some jobs in other states, which might pay better than the District does. In 2011 I’ll be allowed to earn as much as I can, and so it would be useful to find someplace that pays more than $2,400 per section. Someplace that’s not ASU: I could earn about $3,200 teaching there, but I really want to be done with ASU, now and forevermore.

Speaking of teaching…time’s a-wastin’. Gotta run!

Theme Days, Reconsidered

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So earlier this week, I came up with what sounded like a great idea to manage time: set a “theme” for each day of the week and do tasks related to that and only related to that. Once caught up with all the work that’s gotten out of hand, I figured, this strategy would help control the sense of being utterly scattered and allow me to take control of the mounting flood of labor that is overwhelming my life.

Well.

What it does is demonstrate, loud and clear, why I’m falling behind in all the various survival and income-earning tasks: I simply have too much work for any one person to do in a reasonable pattern of waking hours.

Yesterday was to be a “teaching” day. I’d already spent half of Sunday grading papers, that being a “choir” half-day and a “teaching” half-day.

Okay. Yesterday morning I started at 4:30, and I worked all the way through until 9:00 p.m., with one (count it, 1) break for a 40-minute walk around the neighborhood. Food was leftovers, so consuming breakfast and dinner (no time for lunch) took no more than about 30 minutes. The only reason I stopped at 9:00 was the online grading system went down, blocking me from entering grades. At that point I realized I was so exhausted I couldn’t do anything more.

That was 15 hours of grading papers, standing in front of a classroom, fending off e-mailed queries and demands from students, and wrestling with computerized classroom management software. Add the number of hours I spent on Sunday, about 8 hours, and you have 23 hours. And I still have two more rafts of papers to grade and a three-hour class to meet on Friday!

Probably I’ll need to put in at least two more teaching days to handle the remaining work…and, you know…there are only six more days left in the week. Note that we’re counting Saturday and Sunday as “work week” days. The current Copyeditor’s Desk client thinks I’m going to rewrite his CV for him forthwith; page proofs were supposed to have arrived yesterday for one of our GDU client journals, and those have to be turned around instantly; and I haven’t even picked up the page proofs for the novel I’m supposed to be editing—those landed on my desk last week.

To keep up with the workload, I will have to work 15-hour days, seven days a week, non-frikking-stop!

No wonder my house goes uncleaned for two, three, four weeks in a row. And no wonder I feel crazy when I have to drop what I’m doing to fiddle with the pool equipment. There’s simply no time to get to ordinary daily household tasks.

I have no idea how I’m going to cope with this in the spring, when instead of teaching two three-hour class meetings each week, I will have six one-hour sessions and two ninety-minute sessions. That’s right. Yesterday the spring schedule came in: they’ve given me three sections, which is what I need to get by and for which I’m thankful (in a way). The Monday-Wednesday sections will span 5 hours and 45 minutes a day, from 8:30 a.m. to 2:15 p.m.—counting commute time—for a total of 11 1/2 hours a week. The Friday sections will consume another four hours (with commute time), from 9:30 to 11:30. Thus 15 1/2 hours of each week will be spent in the classroom alone. And I’m paid for slightly less than 20 hours of work a week.

By the time I walk out of a classroom, all I want to do is sit down. I certainly don’t want to jump into the morass of grading papers. To grade papers for one section—short ones, not the 2,500-word research papers required of the 102 sections—takes a good 8 hours. Assuming I wait until the day after papers are handed in, I’m looking at spending that entire day just reading, grading, and filing brain-bangers.

Next spring I’ll have three sections. So grading represents an additional 8 hours of work a week, bare minimum, if papers come in from just one section; 24 hours if all three sections turn in papers, as they do at the semester’s end. So: for 49% FTE pay, we’re proposing that I work 23.5 hours, bare minimum, or 39.5 hours in a week when all three classes are in full swing. That’s before the syllabus, assignments, and class schedules are written for these classes, large tasks I have to complete before the paid job starts.

What we’re looking at here, with three sections of freshman comp, is five full days of unrelenting work each week, and that’s before I get to freelance work, before I water the plants, before I clean the floors and dust the furniture and scrub the bathrooms and degrease the kitchen, before I clean the pool and repair the pool equipment. And before the usual unbelievably time-consuming crises, exceptions, and wackinesses associated with teaching take place.

Yesterday’s 15-hour day of brain-numbing work was not this week’s first such marathon. By 4:30 yesterday morning (when I awoke wondering how the hell I’m going to get by financially next year and how on earth I’m going to handle the workload), I had barely recovered from a similar 15-hour day of editing a psychologist’s reports, articles, and C.V.

I fail to see how these “theme days” are going to work next spring, when four of every seven days will be largely occupied with standing in front of a classroom. That will leave three days and scraps, of which half of one day and one full evening are already committed, in which to do as much as 24 hours of grading, an unknown number of hours of editorial work, plus all the shopping, housework, yard work, car care, dog care, and everything-else care. Forget having a social life: there just won’t be time for idling.

{sigh} Pretty clearly, I’ll have to drop choir again. Damn it. I love singing…it’s the only break in the drudgery I get. But I guess I won’t have time for that, either.

And I’ll have to dumb down the classes even more than they’re already dumbed-down, which is majorly dumbed. The only way to survive this will be to cut incoming papers to a bare minimum. Even now, I’ve succumbed to the “rubric” technique, in which you lay out a set of low-level standards you’re looking for and simply ignore every other error and f**k-up the students commit. Thus a C paper can easily earn a B or even an A, because you simply don’t have time to sift through, mark, and explain every single illiteracy in every single paper. It helps you to get through the stuff a little faster, but the result is less than satisfactory. IMHO. To coin a sentence fragment…

At any rate, this little experiment reveals why I feel like I can’t keep up with my life. I feel that way because it’s objectively true: I can’t keep up with my life.

Image: Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory. Wikipedia Commons.

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The perils of adjunct faculty

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Alas, the first-semester freshman comp course I was scheduled to teach at Paradise Valley Community College this fall didn’t make. The other two sections—both second-semester comp courses—will fly, though.

The chair called and offered to substitute a Wednesday evening course. This presented a choice between collecting $2,400 this fall and rejoining the choir, which holds rehearsals on Sunday evenings.

Hmmm…

money – choir
choir – money

Well, I do need the money. We could go so far as to say I need the money a lot. On the other hand, I also  need my sanity.  Singing contributes mightily to sanity, whereas teaching tends to leach sanity from one’s life. Didn’t take much to come up with an answer for the chair: “no, thanks.”

Really, it’s a bit of a relief. I was starting to worry about how I was going to handle three sections, potentially as many as 90 students in two courses, while holding down a putatively full-time job and writing this blog and pursuing freelance editing work. I can teach two sections of the same course with my eyes closed. So this really will be a better arrangement.

How will I get by, after having diddled away seven grand of my back-up savings on the landscaping project? Remains to be seen, eh?

😉

Truth to tell, there’s plenty stashed in the credit union to serve as a cushion…something over 14 grand. As long as I don’t get sick, I should be OK. Obviously, if I thought I’d starve without that third section, I would have foregone the choir and applied my nose to the proverbial grindstone. But really, I think it will all work out.

Editorial work will not go far to replace this bit of the projected community college income: at the new client’s rate, to make up for this one section I would have to copyedit 480 pages of dense scientific writing between now and December 31. Obviously, that’s not going to happen.

However, we just learned that in January we will pick up a contract with a university press that publishes one of our GDU client journals. This press has a large book list, and it puts out a lot of scholarly periodicals, so I’m hoping we’ll soon be working on more than just the journal that has carried us in like so much flotsam on tide.

In the spring semester, no scheduling issues (except for choir) will prevent me from teaching sections that meet two or three times a week. Between the recession (Arizona’s jobless rate is now well over 9 percent) and GDU’s tuition increases and per-credit-hour surcharges, the community colleges are overrun with students. So there should be no problem filling the teaching dance card come next January.