Being An Adjunct: Helping Teacher’s Salary or A Wasting Your Time?
Becoming an ESL teacher opens up multiple opportunities in terms of the employment available. One can choose from becoming a public-school teacher, a tutor, a private school teacher, an adult education teacher, an adjunct at a local college or university, an online teacher, and many more. The availability of options is quite tempting, but the choice, however, is often determined by the salary target you are aiming at.
When I first got my New Jersey Board of Education certifications, I did it because everyone told me to. Graduating with a degree in education entails getting certified in the areas of your specialization. Although I got three certifications, my job search never included public schools. I was between private adult education schools, tutoring, and teaching as an adjunct at the local community college.
Having a class or two as an adjunct was a great bonus to supplement my income while I was working part-time in private adult education schools part-time. It was a new opportunity to go into higher education, work with college students, use my skills and try my strategies, and also boast of being a college “professor.” Ha-ha, sounds so silly. Students indeed called me “professor” although I begged them not to be so official, I never associated myself with that rank, and I never felt entitled to be one with just Master’s degree so common among ESL teachers. The experience of being an adjunct is quite remarkable and worth having. My perception of this role has altered as my experience grew, and as my salary at one of the public schools where I was hired increased dramatically.
What you need to know is that being an adjunct will never make you rich, not even close. It will not even make you comfortable financially unless you teach ten classes at five colleges. The money will always be scarce. Positions will always be uncertain from semester to semester. The value you will provide to students will never be proportionally compensated. As I said before, when you start adjuncting in addition to some part-time job, it’s a great resource to have. Yet, once public school salary comes on the radar, one immediately starts reevaluating whether it’s worth keeping an adjunct position at all.
My decision to stop adjuncting came for the same reason. Once I started working in a public school system, my paycheck grew and thanks to my family’s smart money managing strategies, the necessity to adjunct at night was eliminated. I continued doing so for a couple of semesters longer just because I loved the experience so much less than I liked my compensation.
There are pros and cons to adjuncting to consider. Starting may be hard and confusing since you are given a lot of freedom in implementing the curriculum for a particular course. Once you get the students’ list in your hands, the syllabus and the books, you are pretty much free to do what you think will work the best in your classroom. The first semester would be challenging. The syllabus needs to be understood and supported with the materials you would need to create. In my personal experience, I would produce tons of additional materials my students could use to comprehend the taught concepts. You would need to teach the same course for two or three semesters to become comfortable with the topics and figure out the best and most effective ways to reach students and orient them towards success because eventually your success as a teacher will be judged based on how many students pass the course at the departmental final. Once you taught the course once, the second time teaching it becomes a breeze. The third semester, you cat teach with your eyes closed. A lot of processes become automated since you already have developed your materials, employed successful strategies, and know the system inside out.
My fourth semester of teaching the same course was the easiest. I would spend the minimum time on preparation, and I would enjoy being in the classroom most because I already had so much experience in teaching the course. I would become more creative, modify things that could work more efficiently, rearrange things in the syllabus, eliminate exercises and activities that would not work anymore. Teaching for a long time pushes you to become more creative with the material and your teaching techniques. For me, it was a lot of joy. Sometimes I feel like it’s the place I would love to be and develop professionally.
On the other side, regarding compensation, adjuncting is still the suckiest job in the world. It’s not sustainable for many and is maintained by people who either need an additional income badly or those who don’t care to teach for pennies. When I was adjuncting, my adjunct check was nothing compared to my public school salary. Besides, I started realizing that the value I was providing in the classroom for my students was never and will never be adequately compensated. While teaching an evening writing class, I still had to allot time for quiz correction, essay checking, responding to students’ emails. This time was not compensated. Besides, I would be busy two nights a week teaching till late at night and coming home happy but absolutely exhausted. You might say that public school teaching also involves planning, paperwork, correction of tests and quizzes; however, with certain systems in place it’s entirely possible to do the school job at school and leave your time at home occupied only with the family activities and whatever you desire. Unlike public school teaching, adjuncting requires personal time sacrifice, and I believe it is not compensated accordingly.
In the meantime, I still love teaching at the college level despite some disadvantages of this position. I continued working as an adjunct in the evening and teach an intensive writing class for two semesters after I started working in a public school system. I never counted the money I received for adjuncting, it was not essential or relevant to me anymore. I did it because I loved it so much. I was inspired by that experience and felt like it was my true path until I started pondering whether two busy nights till 10 p.m. away from my family was worth the trouble. And then I stopped. I didn’t go back. I thought I would sacrifice my passion for the sake of my family and spending the evenings with my daughter. I still miss it a lot, but I know that being an adjunct would bring me neither future nor financial stability.
Everyone’s experience is different. My adjuncting job made me realize that my future is in college teaching that I might pursue later after some additional studies. As of now, it’s not worth the trouble.
Make sure to download my list of •Things to Consider When You Become An Adjunct•
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