For Adjuncts, Time Really is Money

Conventional wisdom declares that adjuncts have very little power in matters most important to them -- namely, compensation and benefits. Adjuncts, it is said, will begin to have control over their situations only when they collectively bargain and unionize.

Maybe so. But until the revolution comes, we all have bills to pay. What, if anything, can we adjuncts do to directly affect our earnings in the short term? Of course we do not set our own fees; our hiring institutions do. But this does not mean that our earnings rate -- that is, the amount of money we earn hourly -- is fixed.

The top half of the dollars-per-hour fraction is indeed fixed. But the bottom half of the fraction is time. And our time -- how we use it, manage it, focus it -- is entirely within our control. Adjuncts can have an immediate impact on their earnings rate by improving their time management. In this instance, as in so many others, time really is money.

Let’s crunch some numbers. Say your university pays you $2,400 to teach a course for a 15-week semester. The class meets for three hours a week, and you are required by your department to spend two hours a week in scheduled office hours. That puts you in class -- “at work” -- for 75 hours over the course of the semester. But you still must add time for grading, preparation, and other odd duties (ordering books, submitting freshman progress reports, whatever).

Depending on your experience, your class assignments, your preparation (or lack thereof), the amount of time you actually spend on the job will vary significantly. For every extra hour you spend on these tasks, your dollars-per-hour rate diminishes. For the sake of illustration, let’s say it takes you an additional five hours a week for these tasks. That’s another 75 hours, for a grand total of 150 hours for the semester. Do the math -- that works out to $16 an hour.

Well, it could be worse. In fact, it will be worse if you are a beginning instructor and are teaching a class for the first time; you will need far more than five hours a week for preparation and grading. This will push your hourly earnings into the single-digits. This is depressing, I know. I remember quite well those early semesters of my own adjunct teaching career when I spent hours and hours of work to do even one class period. This is just the nature of the business. Short of being able to scan information directly into our brains, we are stuck with it. Being a “green” instructor -- at any rank -- involves a steep learning curve.

The thing to remember, though, is that you will be paid, most likely, again and again for that initial preparation. Chances are, you’ll teach that material again soon, especially if you stay in the adjunct game, simply because adjuncts get assigned to teach the same kinds of classes over and over again. So, your hourly earnings may reside in the cellar for that first class, but the 2nd, 5th, 10th, and 15th time you teach it, you won’t do even a fraction of that preparation. Your earnings rate will increase simply because of that. Try to keep this in mind as you slog through those early semesters preparing a course for the first time.

The key variable in all this is time, and we can improve on that $16-an-hour rate by trimming the time it takes to do our job. What are some ways to do this?

First of all, quit wasting time. Here I am reminded of a classmate of mine years ago in a language class. We had vocabulary quizzes every day at the start of class. My classmate worked his way through school as a downtown courier delivering business documents and he spent lots of time waiting for and riding elevators in downtown skyscrapers. So, he used the time to study vocabulary cards. He kept a little pile of them in his shirt pocket. He refused to waste those spare minutes he knew he had throughout his workday. He always aced his quizzes, too.

Adjuncts can’t afford to waste time any more than my friend could. We must not throw away valuable minutes throughout the day telling ourselves, “Oh, it’s just a few minutes, what could I have gotten done in such a short time?” Maybe you have a few discussion questions that need refreshing for a forthcoming class. Next semester’s book order needs to be signed, dated, and put into campus mail. A student’s rough draft needs reviewing. These tasks take a few minutes at the most, yet when we throw away the spare minutes throughout our day we end up stretching the entire workday past the time when it really should be finished.

Let me give you an example: Say you have a 40-minute commute to your next class. A time-is-money mind-set will ask: What can I do in these 40 minutes that I will spend anyway getting to campus? If you are commuting via bus, train, or subway you have all kinds of things that can be done in 40 minutes. Heck, you could prepare for your entire class in that time! Don’t get on that train empty-handed. Take a pile of stuff that needs completing and get it done on the commute. That’s turning your time into money.

What if you’re like me and drive yourself to campus? You can’t very well grade papers and drive at the same time. Well, here’s what I do: Take five minutes to read over your class notes just before you begin your commute, and spend that 40 minutes thinking over your material. Think about how you’ll present it in class, what discussion questions might work better than those from the last time you taught it, what passages from the text might be good to start with. I’ve even used a tape recorder to record good discussion questions that come to me while in the middle of my 40-minute brainstorm. Then, I scratch these out on a Post-it Note before I even get out of my vehicle, stick it in the inside cover of my textbook, and I’m ready to roll. You’re going to spend that 40 minutes commuting anyway. Use it! Cultivate a time-is-money mindset so that for every jewel of “free” time that comes your way throughout the workday, you’ve got a list of tasks ready to take advantage of it.

Secondly, get organized and stay that way. In order to make money in the adjunct business, you have to teach many classes every semester. And each class comes with its own tonnage of notes, handouts, slides, materials, whatever. Get that stuff together before the semester even starts. Take an afternoon and put away all the materials from last semester -- completely remove it from your workspace -- then reorganize that space for the new set of classes. Come up with a system that works for you to keep track of all this so that it’s handy, in good shape, and ready to go when you are. Lack of organization will drain your time away like a sieve.

Staying organized and not wasting time are “no brainers” when it comes to time management. In my decade of adjunct teaching, however, I have seen two main things drain away the time of busy adjuncts: overpreparation and overgrading. Here I am reminded of yet another friend and fellow adjunct who never seemed to be able to prepare for a 50-minute class period in less than two hours, no matter what the subject, no matter how many times she’d taught the exact topic before. I learned this about her the week we both happened to be teaching The Communist Manifesto. I had taught the text several times, spent about 30 minutes looking through my notes and some key passages, and was ready for class. My friend, however, who’d taught Marx as much as I had, reread the entire text, reread all the secondary materials from her initial research, and spent even more time doing exactly what I’m not sure. She overprepared in a big way because she just couldn’t get her mind around going into a class without doing a lot of work. And her classes weren’t any better for it.

Nothing dilutes your earnings rate into single digits faster than reliving your graduate-student days. Understand, I’m not suggesting you not prepare for class. I am suggesting that you stay focused on the reality of the task at hand and prepare accordingly. Teaching The Communist Manifesto to freshmen in a 50-minute class should require two hours of preparation only if you are teaching it for the first time. After that, you should limit yourself.

The same goes for overgrading. I have a full-time colleague who takes about 40 minutes to grade every five-page paper her freshmen submit to her. At this rate, it takes her more than 20 hours to grade the papers for just one class. She reads every paper twice, makes extensive corrections to everything she marks wrong (including rephrasing poorly written sentences, reworking introductions, etc.), and writes the students an assessment essay at the end. Well, this is all fine and good if you only teach one class a semester and have nothing else to do with your life.

Busy adjuncts simply cannot spend this kind of time grading a five-page freshman paper. Nor should they. Granted, when you are new to grading and are just learning how to evaluate written work consistently and fairly, you will take longer to grade. With experience, however, it should take you less time to grade effectively. I spend only a third of the time my full-time colleague spends, grading the same kinds of papers, and we both get equally good marks from our students about our feedback to them on their written work.

The time-management truth that these examples illuminate is that spending more time on something does not necessarily equate to doing it better. Furthermore, tasks will often expand to fit the time you have available. If you have 10 hours to grade a batch of papers, you’re likely to take that entire 10 hours to complete the task unless you deliberately limit yourself to fewer hours.

Successful time managers in every area of business will tell you that a big part of the secret of their success is their ability to focus. Being focused means you don’t get distracted very often and when you do, you waste no time getting back on track. Being focused means you know exactly what must be done to complete a task and you don’t do less or more than is required. Being focused means you have a brand of mental toughness that allows you to complete in only an hour what most others struggle to finish in three.

If you have a pile of exams to grade and a five-hour block of time, push yourself to grade them in three hours. You’ve given yourself a two-hour window in case you don’t quite make it, but chances are, you will make it and you’ll begin to see how the time for all sorts of tasks in your day can be minimized.

I have lived this principle for over 10 years now in my own adjunct teaching business. I have worked steadily to raise ever higher my focus and concentration skills, as well as my organizational skills. And I have reaped the rewards financially by being able to shoulder heavy teaching loads, maintain my quality of work and my sanity, and still rarely ever work more than 40 hours a week.

Avail yourself of the Stoic wisdom that exhorts us to work on the things within our control. Your time is the part of the adjunct equation that you most definitely can control.

Actually, if you think about it, the top half of the dollars-per-hour equation may be in your control, too. If you live in any of the dozens of midsize cities in America, you have many higher-education venues to whom you might “sell your wares.” Why stay at the ones that pay the least?

But that’s a topic for another column.