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#1: Minnie Fuerstnau (m.fuerstnau) on Oct 27, 2007

Good luck in high school! It was great to see your name on a puzzle again; I'm sure you and your brother have been too busy for making them. Thanks.

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Thanks for making that puzzle. Sure am glad I asked you to do it ;)

Thats ok Mercy, it took me a while to think of a puzzle and I thought I should just do this one.Lol :D

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I would like to get some more schoolin' I have to graduate and join the real world soon.

It really depends on how willing you are to live in poverty. As a graduate student in English, I can go to school while making a tidy income of $12,000 a year (to teach the undergraduate English courses). I work a few extra jobs, but I'm not supposed to.

Right now I live with my parents. I do have a job set up but my problem is I don't like change.

My field is computer science, I probably could teach undergrad courses (definately better then some of my teachers) but that is still change.

Mostly I think I just need to complain during the transition and then I'll be ok.

Ah I have no college degree and I make $8/hour part-time. It's the best I'll ever be able to do. Of course 4 years ago I could only get $7/hour. That is a 14% increase in my salary in 4 years. I can't wait for the minimum wage to go up to $7+ so maybe I'll get a raise to $8.50!! (Sarcasm)

Last year I grossed $10,000. My rent is $800/month and if you do the math... yeah that's $400 left for the rest of the year, but wait, I forgot to subtract that $2000 for taxes. So how do I continue to live?

Well I used to use credit cards so now I have a tidy debt. Today I have a husband. Money sucks. :(

There ain't no justice.

My standard billing rate is $250 an hour. Of course, that's a bit deceptive because that's before business expenses and taxes (including the rather fierce self employment tax) and since I only get paid when I am actually working for a customer. I spent much of the last week repairing and upgrading my development system, which I get paid $0 an hour for. Also note that I have zero job security. Any contract could end at any time, and there is no guarantee that another will show up.

But so many people work so much harder than I do, under worse conditions, often in jobs with more importance and responsibility, and get paid a fraction of what I get paid. Shouldn't a good police officer or a good grade school teacher get paid more than me?

The market is fair only for extremely warped definitions of "fair". I often wish that Karl Marx's attempt to find a better solution hadn't proved so ameniable to corruption.

Out here in California the minimum wage is $8.00 hr.

I don't have a college degree either, right now I make $25 hr & have 3 part time jobs, If I had a degree I could easily double or triple my hourly rate.

So all you young ones out there..GET THAT DEGREE !!!

Minimum wage here is a little more then $7 an hour. I've had the same part time job for 6 years so I'm up to $10 an hour with them.

The paper I'm writing right now (or supposed to be -- I'm getting right back to it, I swear!) is mainly about the exploitation of "part-time" college professors. Part-time is in quotes because most part-time professors I know teach 6-8 classes a semester at 3-4 different schools for a total of well above the number of classes a "full-time" professor with full benefits teaches, at well below their pay. My research is crossing over into many other areas. It turns out LOTS of professions are suffering what's called "casualization"-- nurses, paralegals, etc are all finding it difficult to find work in which they get to work as many hours as they would like, and benefits packages are becoming scarce as well. Corporations (the name can be used to refer to health care and educational institutions as well since today such institutions are based on a corporate model) blame it on the "market" even as they continue to raise the pay and benefits packages of their CEOs to exorbitant rates. Today the average difference between a CEO's salary and the that of the lowest worker is 1000 to 1, MUCH higher than in any other industrialized country.

Okay-- step off the soap box and put it in the essay, Arduinna!

I did one term of part-time professoring at a decent teaching college about a decade ago. Half the reason I gave it up was that the pay was less than a quarter of what I made consulting.

The other reason was that it was just heart breaking. I really liked the students. Some were adults, older than me, back to school after raising kids. Some were going to school part-time, while cashiering at K-Mart to raise the money to pay for college. I so wanted things to work for them, but a lot of them were simply going to flunk. They needed lots and lots of individual help. They needed the prerequisite classes taught to them all over again. Heck, they needed High School taught to them all over again. Maybe they needed a whole different way of thinking. And I couldn't do it. I only had a few hours a day on campus. I'm only an OK teacher. I'm no miracle worker. So I flunked them. And what was served by that? They had come in the door on the first day of class already all set up to flunk, and there was nothing either of us could do about it, but there ought to have been.

I didn't have the stomach for that, so I took the easy way out and went back to writing programs for four times the pay.

I don't think anyone can blame you, Jan! If I don't find a full-time position, I will definitely not continue adjuncting for much longer.

I agree with you about them being set up for failure. I taught a developmental writing course one summer. I'm sorry to say that I went in there with a bit of prejudice that these were just not the "smart" ones. Turns out most of them just had really crappy high school experiences. (Not that all high school teachers are to blame either!)

I'm teaching online now, which is a whole new can of worms. I just got through flunking several students who just could not understand how to avoid plagiarism. Despite several attempts at rewrites, they just kept doing it. I think I would have had a better chance in a traditional classroom.

See now I can give the student's perspective on it too. I have mostly part time teachers in the department I'm in. Some of them are ok but a lot of them are horrible teachers. I know of at least two that teach at other colleges. The problems as I see it are that students don't have access to the teacher for questions outside of the classroom, the teachers aren't always able to give the appropriate amount of preparation time to the class and (at my school) most of my classes are at night, between 5pm and 11pm, because the part time teachers need to get from another job to the campus.

Generally, it would seem that it's unfair all around.

I totally agree, and I think appealing to the diminishing quality of education due to part-time teachers (not all of it their fault!) is the only way to convince management to change the practice. They just save too much money by hiring part-timers!

I agree. Part time positions have their place but I don't think a lot of people can be good part time teachers.

Certainly the efforts and talents of the best part time teachers will be greatly impacted by their ability to eat and pay the rent.

Very true.

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