The Adjunct Guide to Classroom Triumph

By Carl Linden

College classrooms today can be challenging environments for adjuncts who are short on time, patience and resources. Proven tips and tricks will help even the most harried adjunct not only survive, but thrive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Silver Penny Press
• Release date: Mar 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310327605

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The Adjunct Guide to Classroom Triumph

Carl Linden

Copyright 2014 by Carl Linden

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Silver Penny Press

St. Augustine, Florida

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Chapter 1 : Survive and Thrive

The email showed up in my private account three weeks after my last day of teaching at Big U. The dean said that a student had been trying to reach me with questions about her F grade, but I wasn't answering her emails. I explained that as an adjunct instructor, I only check email at schools for which I'm currently teaching.

Surely the dean didn't expect former teachers to keep checking their school email?

Surely he did. He also wanted me to provide documentation for the unhappy student, even though I'd left that work with his assistant. Soon he would be asking me to meet with and appease the student, despite the fact I wasn't being paid.

Welcome to the adjunct labor market, where schools routinely ask instructors to do work even if paychecks have ended. Over the last several years I've seen all sorts of situations like this. Usually schools demand unpaid work between terms as a condition of continuing employment, but I've had friends contacted by former schools up to a year after employment as ended with requests for information or records that it should already have.

I feel sympathy for students with genuine needs their schools can't meet because the school relies on temporary, transitory instructors to keep its profits high or budget intact. The schools choose a labor model that guarantees disruption, uncertainty and communication gaps.

Sympathy, however, doesn't mean I'm willing to work more than a token amount of time for free. In the case of Big U, I spent about fifteen minutes detailing the information the student needed and sent that back to the dean. A week later, the dean asked for more information on the student. I spent another twenty minutes tracking that down and sent it back. A week passed in silence. Then the dean wrote to tell me the student wanted to talk over the phone to resolve questions and wanted to know my availability.

I wrote back politely but succinctly: I was not available due to my obligations to current schools and students. Any further queries would be met with an invoice for my time and labor.

I haven't heard from that school since. Perhaps I burned a bridge of employment, but I prefer to work for employers who respect my time and money as much as they respect their own. Doctors, dentists, and lawyers don't work for free. Why should I? Besides, we all know that the student's goal was