About a week or so after my interview, I started getting major cold feet about saying "yes," if I'm offered the job. Even with the low pay, which I could deal with, it is the driving. It would be intense. The longer I have to think about it, the more I have to wonder if it would really be worth it. So, I emailed an ex-instructor of mine and asked her flat out, "If I took this job, would it remove the stain of adjuncting from my CV? Or is that a lost cause?"
Her answers were pretty much what I expect: "No" and "No." Of course, she put it much more eloquently than that. She basically said that I am what I am. I have a wide range of experience, some academic and some not, and the right employer would acknowledge that and the wrong employer wouldn't.
Other than the fact that adjuncts are treated like second-class citizens, these questions also came from an experience I had once when a college administrator told me that my 10+ years of teach a min. of 2 college classes a semester didn't count as real teaching experience. Now, if I had a couple of full-time years as, say, a high school teacher, that would count. But what I was doing? Nope. I tried to reason with him that what he said just didn't make sense to me. How could all of those classes I've taught not count? How could someone who has never taught a college class at all be considered more experienced than I was?
"That's just the way it is," he told me.
So, I bought into his retarded reasoning. Now, after thinking about it and getting her encouraging email response, I realize I am lucky I never really worked for that administrator. It would not have been the right job for me because he immediately had the attitude that I didn't measure up because I came from Adjunct Land.
Before receiving her response, I had just about convinced myself that I was not going to take the job if offered. I love the school and the people that work there, and I'm sure the teaching experience wouldn't hurt my CV, but I think I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing and see what happens.
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