My Adventures as a Full-Time Teacher and Part-Time Adjunct Professor
by Greg Cielec
After teaching on the high school level for fifteen years, I found myself in a rut. I still liked teaching, but started to realize that more and more of what I did during my school day was becoming less and less about teaching, and more about too many other things I didn’t enjoy doing. My school days seemed to be more about picture days, cafeteria duty, patrolling the halls between classes, trying to plug "programs" our curriculum director bought at conventions into my lesson plans (I’ve been through everything from "PACES" to "Study Island"), and preparing students for way too much standardized testing. I guess I needed a new challenge. My career was becoming a job.
But I also realized it was a good job. I got a little raise each year, I was done by 2:30 each day, plus had holidays and the summer free.
I would occasionally see ads for part-time instructors at some of the local colleges we have here in northern Ohio in the newspaper. After teaching almost everything under the language arts umbrella at the high school level, I felt pretty confident I could teach at least English and speech at the college level. I had been coaching Division III football part-time for several years at Case Western Reserve University and John Carroll University, so I had had contact with college students and liked it.
The first time I applied for a college teaching job, I wasn’t that impressed with my own résumé. In my heart I knew that my years on the high school level more than qualified me to teach on the next level, but that did not show on my résumé. I had a B.A. in speech communications, and a Masters in education. Even though I had been teaching primarily English over the years, I did not have a degree in it. I did have around twenty graduate hours in English, which helped.
I had been paid to write some things over the years, and had written a novel that was a regional hit (selling about 3,500 copies). I listed those things on that first résumé, and I also came up with a list of a half dozen or so contacts that would say good things about me. I added their names and phone numbers on a separate sheet and stapled it to my résumé.
That first résumé did not get me an adjunct position, but it got me thinking about my marketability and what would I need to do, both on the education side and the writing side, to get a quality adjunct position. I started immediately. Because of the regional success of my novel, I was asked to speak at everything from Kiwanis Clubs meetings to the elder classes at our local community colleges. I came up with a presentation about writing a first novel that I presented at a few writing conferences. I took a couple of seminars at local colleges that increased my English graduate credits.
Though my personal and professional résumés were bulking up, and each Fall I sent out professional résumés, I wasn’t getting interviews. I have taught at four different high schools over the years, and all four jobs came at nontraditional times. For example, my first teaching job I replaced a woman having a nervous breakdown half way through the school year. The same thing happened with my first adjunct job. After giving up looking for an adjunct position, I got a call in late January from a dean at BGSU Firelands College, a community college that is part of Bowling Green State University, he needed someone to teach two classes that had already started. He sounded desperate; I had been sending them résumés for several years. After a quick interview on the phone, he offered me the job, and I have been there since. Now I just teach one class a semester, a Saturday morning writing the research paper English class.
Several years later, I also accepted a speech position at Lakeland Community College. The fact I was already "in" teaching at Firelands helped. I teach one class a semester at LCC, either public speaking or interpersonal communications. I have yet to tire of teaching at either college, and still enjoy it and find it rewarding. The college experience has been a good shot in the arm for my teaching self-image, and I know when I put those positions on my next professional résumé it will represent several jobs done well.
I am not that far from retiring from my high school teaching job, but I still see myself being an adjunct for a long time into the future. I sometimes think about living in a warmer climate, or teaching some new classes. Not everything has been perfect, and seeing how some things go politically on college campuses, I’ve never stopped adding things to my personal résumé, so when the day comes when I do leave my current adjunct positions I will feel confident I can find adjunct teaching work elsewhere. I started reviewing CDs, concerts, and plays for a local arts website, and writing a monthly column for a football fan magazine. During the last five summers I have attended four National Endowment for the Humanities programs, and they have been outstanding. Bowling Green allows their long-time adjuncts to take two free classes a school year. Thus far, I have taken four classes that could go towards a doctorate in English or Communications. All of these things will be added to my professional résumé when I start looking for my next adjunct positions.
My adjunct positions have been good for my full time high school teaching job, and my high school job has been good for my adjunct classes. I am a student centered classroom teacher, very rarely lecturing in front of the class. The class I teach at Firelands takes place in a classroom in the library, complete with a computer for each student. This is an ideal situation since for most of the semester we are researching and writing an extensive paper. Since many of my students are adult learners coming back to school after years away because of a job loss, I sometimes use writing and word processing exercises I first developed for my high school students. Since the emphasis in my college class is on both traditional and electronic research, I have had to learn how to do research using electronic data bases and journals, how to include things like DVDs and compact discs on a works cited page, and how to be up-to-date on the latest MLA standards for parenthetical documentation. Many of those new ways of research have found their way into my high school classes, and I have made several presentations to our high school faculty on new research methods, such as the MLA formatting of electronic sources on a works cited page and in parenthetical documentation.
I teach public speaking at both Lakeland and my high school, and the differences between the two are minimal. The topics for the different presentations and speeches do not differ much, although more is expected of the college students as far as research on a topic. Both classes include a final where the presenter has to use different types of technology in their presentation, from playing music, showing a film clip, and using a power point slides as a backdrop. Again, the expectations of the college class are higher, but I even use many of the same handouts, and I show the high school students how similar the syllabi for both classes are.
My college teaching has helped me regain the feeling of academic freedom and creativity I used to have in my high school teaching job. For most colleges it is economically more advantageous to hire several adjuncts than a full-time professor to teach a group of classes. No benefits to pay, no tenure to grant, no increasing salary to meet. Because I do have a decent paying day job with benefits, I can afford to teach under those circumstances. And when I am retired, I will start looking for that next adjunct position.
(Greg Cielec is both an adjunct professor and a freelance writer. For more about him and to check out some of his work and his blog visit http://www.gregcielec.com.)