New efforts!

[LadyVamp]

This is entirely off topic - but after reading the last couple of pages, it occurs to me that Arcana should attempt to teach on the college level as an adjunct. The explanation on particles was real to me - and the Looney Tunes tie-in would keep any college kids attention.

I used to work in the community college system.  I know what adjunct profs go through.  Can be very rough...But if it gets our game back quicker as in by next week... lol

[Tubbius]

I used to work in the community college system.  I know what adjunct profs go through.  Can be very rough...But if it gets our game back quicker as in by next week... lol

I teach English at the local community college as an adjunct; today's date marks my having been there thirteen years.  Full-time work in English is extraordinarily hard to come by, especially here in N.C.  :(

[Arcana]

Yes but can Arcana turn left at Albuquerque?  ;)

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[LadyVamp]

I teach English at the local community college as an adjunct; today's date marks my having been there thirteen years.  Full-time work in English is extraordinarily hard to come by, especially here in N.C.  :(

I was never an adjunct but did work in the technical college system in SC.  12 weeks of work.  Paid at the end of it but only if you got a good response from the students.  The life or lack of of the adjuncts.  I was staff instead of faculty.  I always thought the adjunct were clueless when I was in college.  After I got out, I realized the full-time faculty was the one that didn't know how the real world worked.

Went back to the school I worked at 15 years later to see one of the faculty.  A student told him they should hire me.  I had to tell him they couldn't afford me now.

Arcana would probably not survive being an adjunct prof.  I could see her chewing out students for JoshX like responses.  Though it might be fun watching her take on 20+ blank slates who believe they are the all knowing center of the universe.  I just wouldn't know who to pity.

[ukaserex]

Just goes to show, experiences and perspectives vary.

I meant no disrespect - only that Arcana has a very clear communication style. Something lacking in many of the professors whose classes I've taken.

The adjuncts, however, mostly worked in the real world full time and made a little extra doing adjunct work. Not a ton - but anywhere from $1500 to $2k per semester. And, all of us students knew that the adjuncts knew more than the faculty; it was evident in their lessons.

1500 bucks, not bad for 3 hours a week, if you ask me. But, you didn't, so I'll hush.

[Victoria Victrix]

Just goes to show, experiences and perspectives vary.

I meant no disrespect - only that Arcana has a very clear communication style. Something lacking in many of the professors whose classes I've taken.

The adjuncts, however, mostly worked in the real world full time and made a little extra doing adjunct work. Not a ton - but anywhere from $1500 to $2k per semester. And, all of us students knew that the adjuncts knew more than the faculty; it was evident in their lessons.

1500 bucks, not bad for 3 hours a week, if you ask me. But, you didn't, so I'll hush.

3 hours a week teaching.  Plus another 20 a week prepping and grading.  Times 16 weeks.  276 hours.  Works out to $5.50 an hour, bottom, $7.50 an hour, tops.  You make more money in fast food.

[Teikiatsu]

Re: PvP
I'm of the mindset that City of Heroes and PvP suffered irreconcilable differences, they were never going to get along and had reached a point of the most amicable resolution being to draw a line down the middle of the house and try to stay out of each other's way. 

My suspicion is that CoH went long enough as just PvE and appealing to people who wanted to be heroic and team-oriented that by the time they figured out how to shoe-horn in a semblance of PvP system that all the PvP'rs went to WoW or some other games that started out with a PvP option.  The population that was left behind was mostly 'meh' about the Arenas.

Re: NCSoft
My personal suspicion is that NCSoft attached a prereq to the CoH IP sale that the buyer must demonstrate some certain X aptitude with game creation/management, that prereq being some target goal in the CoT project itself.  Maybe a public beta or at least a costume creator to show off.  That the delays in CoT have caused the downstream delay in CoH revival info.  Just my guess.

As good a theory as any.

I wonder though, how much money would NCsoft have made if they had let the game run persistently, maybe with a $5/month subscription and a reduced market costs.  Especially if the pending issue had been release beforehand.

[ukaserex]

3 hours a week teaching.  Plus another 20 a week prepping and grading.  Times 16 weeks.  276 hours.  Works out to $5.50 an hour, bottom, $7.50 an hour, tops.  You make more money in fast food.

All our adjuncts had grad students to do the grading - and they don't need to prep. They already have the material mastered - they work with it daily. At least - that was the case when I was a grad student.

A faculty professor may have to put some time in with prep - unless he/she reads the book aloud like I've had some professors do. But most adjuncts know the material backwards and forwards, having used it on a regular basis. (and I could make the supposition that a faculty professor teaches the same courses every semester. I think they pretty much learn the material after a couple of semesters if they didn't know it before. )

What programmer would not know problem solving with the more contemporary languages? Sure, there might be some guys using something obscure like Cobra and Python who may not be terribly familiar with C#, but by and large, they'll be teaching the languages they use on a regular basis.

What accountant wouldn't know a debit from a credit and not be able to teach someone how to create an income statement or a balance sheet?

So, um...no. No prep time. Not unless you have no business teaching the class in the first place.

I'll grant you some admin time for office hours and the occasional make-up test. Maybe even some meetings with other faculty or students. But it really is about 3-4 hours a week. 10 at the most. (which still makes the 1.5 - 2k look weak when you break it down - but for me - when you break work up into a 1-2 hour day that's not even every week day, it still seems like a sweet part-time gig. But, hey, that's just me.

[Thunder Glove]

Re: NCSoft
My personal suspicion is that NCSoft attached a prereq to the CoH IP sale that the buyer must demonstrate some certain X aptitude with game creation/management, that prereq being some target goal in the CoT project itself.  Maybe a public beta or at least a costume creator to show off.  That the delays in CoT have caused the downstream delay in CoH revival info.  Just my guess.

While Nate is involved with both groups, Missing World Media (which is developing CoT) is not in any way related to the team that's trying to buy CoH, and so the development speed of CoT wouldn't be used as any sort of measuring stick.  Even Nate won't be involved with CoH if/when the deal goes through, he just started the introductions, as it were.

[Codewalker]

3 hours a week teaching.  Plus another 20 a week prepping and grading.  Times 16 weeks.  276 hours.  Works out to $5.50 an hour, bottom, $7.50 an hour, tops.  You make more money in fast food.

Someone very close to me was an adjunct for several years. It's shameful how they treat them.

That pay scale sounds about right, though there's a catch. They won't let adjuncts teach more than 3 classes, because then they would be required to pay benefits, health insurance, etc. So if you're trying to get a full time teaching job (which are few and hard to come by) and are having to work as an adjunct just to make ends meet, you usually have to work at 2 different schools, often quite far apart to do it. Or flip burgers part time or something - isn't that a great use of a master's degree?

The worst part is that many schools, especially community colleges, take advantage of the fact that adjuncts are cheap and don't hire enough full time faculty (making it even harder to get a full-time job). If they used adjuncts as a buffer for enrollment fluctuation that's one thing, but when 70% of classes are being taught by adjuncts, that's a problem IMO.

All our adjuncts had grad students to do the grading - and they don't need to prep. They already have the material mastered - they work with it daily. At least - that was the case when I was a grad student.

HAH! Maybe at a cushy private university, but at a state school? HAH!

Try teaching 7 English classes, 25-30 students each, in a semester sometime in order to make enough to pay your bills. Try asking the administration for somebody to help grade the hundreds of papers. I'll bet I can hear the laughter from here.

So, um...no. No prep time. Not unless you have no business teaching the class in the first place.

Prep time has nothing to do with learning the material. Most adjuncts don't teach the same class over and over. If you're teaching at 2 different schools you have different textbooks to deal with, and those textbooks (which as an adjunct you are required to base your class around) change from time to time as well. So do the learning objectives that you're required to cover in your syllabus.

There's also the course calendar that has to be prepared to fit the schedule (placement of holidays changes), especially if your class has things like group projects or assignments that aren't just a single day.

If you're a good professor, you're constantly adjusting your classes as well; making refinements and adjustments based on previous experience as well as new developments in the field. Even something as simple as the figuring out the best grade point breakdown for your schedule is part of prep time.

Sure, if you're lazy, you can probably get away with just tossing up a premade class module and re-using the same syllabus from semester to semester. I've seen terrible adjuncts who do that and barely lift a finger to teach their class, and for what they get paid I can't blame them too much. Anyone who is there because they actually care about the students - which is the only reason a good professor would take a job as an adjunct rather doing something outside of education - will be doing a lot more work than that.

[Sermon]

1500 bucks, not bad for 3 hours a week, if you ask me. But, you didn't, so I'll hush.

Not to pick on your post, but you think a 3 hour class only takes 3 hours out of your week? You are basically assuming no commute, no secondary costs, no prep, and no grading.

So, um...no. No prep time. Not unless you have no business teaching the class in the first place.

This is downright wrong and rather offensive.

[Arcana]

So, um...no. No prep time. Not unless you have no business teaching the class in the first place.

Cold, I could probably speak for an hour or two about any subject for which I was reasonably familiar, much less something I had professional mastery.  But I would never deliberately inflict a cold lecture on students if I could help it.  Typically, I put about twenty to forty hours of prep time into the typical one hour professional presentation.

If I was going to teach a fifteen week semester course in something, I would expect to put in about four to six hundred hours of work into developing that course the first time if it was something I was already very familiar with, and about two hundred hours a year updating it if it was something in a developing field (say, datacenter technology), and maybe fifty to a hundred hours a year updating it if it was about something that didn't change as much (like say English literature).

Of course, not everyone does this, but I would.

Factoring in travel time and such, I would guestimate a fifteen week college level course to burn about 500-700 hours in the first year, and about 300 hours a year in successive years for a topic for which I would be professionally qualified to teach.  A $1500 stipend would be about $5/hour in the second year.  I would be doing it more as a community service than as a money making maneuver.  It is also something I have put some time into thinking about, when I decide to semi-retire.

[Vee]

I thought it was horrible and being in philosophy my preps didn't change from semester to semester. After the third time through of each course I had the stuff cold with no prep and it was still barely worth it (my grading wasn't too bad either, only in-class essay exams and short reaction papers, as I'd given up assigning longer papers before I went adjunct when I was still on my grad student funding because I didn't sign up to teach middle school english composition). There's something particularly soul sucking about it over and above the bad pay and no benefits even in the best case scenario. If you put in a fraction of the amount of work Arcana's talking about you'd be looking for a rope and a rafter by the second week.

[Tahquitz]

This is downright wrong and rather offensive.

He mentioned Admin Time in an office, maybe he's confusing the two? 

I work in K-12 (I don't teach, I'm classified), prep time here means grading homework, resource development (PowerPoint, websites, etc.) and work in instructional teams (other teachers in the same subject who are also on prep time aligning their work so the correct standards are taught at the right time... common core being a thing for the last 15 months and all), and some use prep time for Intervention (call a student out of class who is at risk of failing for extra practice.)  Some teachers live and die by it, others tend to abuse it (Prep 1st period = I get to come into work at 9am instead of 8 with the rest of the staff.)

My last District allowed prep work for one period per teacher unless it's vocational (they're only present for 2 periods or less a day, so they prep at home since they aren't here full time anyway, similar to adjuncts at college) or PE based (common core for the most part doesn't apply to them.)  They get away with it because it's 400 kids between 30 teachers, so there's wiggle room. (Some get stung... teacher who does agriscience and earth science has a full-plate... he shows up at 5am to prep, and does FFA in the evening.  12 hour days are normal for him.)

My current one doesn't allow prep work for teachers (schools at 98% capacity or higher... 1,000 students per 30 teachers, so giving teachers a prep period would mean lost instructional minutes for too many kids.)

But no amount of prep time will save you if you can't manage your classroom in the first place, which is a common problem in K-12 education.

[Arcana]

But no amount of prep time will save you if you can't manage your classroom in the first place, which is a common problem in K-12 education.

I like kids in general, but I would rather teach K-9 than K-12.

[Vee]

I like kids in general, but I would rather teach K-9 than K-12.

Would you spend the whole semester on just K-9 or situate it within the entirety of the Jim Belushi corpus?

[Arcana]

Would you spend the whole semester on just K-9 or situate it within the entirety of the Jim Belushi corpus?

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[Victoria Victrix]

All our adjuncts had grad students to do the grading - and they don't need to prep. They already have the material mastered - they work with it daily. At least - that was the case when I was a grad student.

A faculty professor may have to put some time in with prep - unless he/she reads the book aloud like I've had some professors do. But most adjuncts know the material backwards and forwards, having used it on a regular basis. (and I could make the supposition that a faculty professor teaches the same courses every semester. I think they pretty much learn the material after a couple of semesters if they didn't know it before. )

What programmer would not know problem solving with the more contemporary languages? Sure, there might be some guys using something obscure like Cobra and Python who may not be terribly familiar with C#, but by and large, they'll be teaching the languages they use on a regular basis.

What accountant wouldn't know a debit from a credit and not be able to teach someone how to create an income statement or a balance sheet?

So, um...no. No prep time. Not unless you have no business teaching the class in the first place.

I'll grant you some admin time for office hours and the occasional make-up test. Maybe even some meetings with other faculty or students. But it really is about 3-4 hours a week. 10 at the most. (which still makes the 1.5 - 2k look weak when you break it down - but for me - when you break work up into a 1-2 hour day that's not even every week day, it still seems like a sweet part-time gig. But, hey, that's just me.

I think you have been effectively pwned by all the posts subsequent to yours. 

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

I think you have been effectively pwned by all the posts subsequent to yours.

While not a teacher, professor or adjunct myself i have enough friends involved in academia and teaching that when i read that post i basically thought, "Oh myyyy, this is going to be good." i was not disappointed.

[Tubbius]

3 hours a week teaching.  Plus another 20 a week prepping and grading.  Times 16 weeks.  276 hours.  Works out to $5.50 an hour, bottom, $7.50 an hour, tops.  You make more money in fast food.

What she said.

$28.71 an hour is solid money. . . except when you can only teach 9 hours a week due to regulations that involve health care and the school's being required to pay insurance if adjuncts work over a set number of hours per week.