Silk Pajamas Are My Work Uniform

I’m an online adjunct at several colleges and technical schools. By the end of this year, 2007, I will have earned $45,000, and I believe my success, if it can be called such, is a direct result of my willingness to view what I do five days a week as a consumable service subject to the whims of the marketplace.

In other words, I don’t run a ministry.

I run a business.

In no way do I suggest there is anything at all wrong with running a ministry. Some of the most intelligent adjuncts it has been my pleasure to know truly believe their deity specifically instructs them to live by the bizarre principal that not being able to afford new soles for their boots somehow provides them with the ability to “help students.”

However, if I want to earn enough currency to exchange for sufficient goods and services to make me physically comfortable, I simply must mentally put myself in the place where “money changes hands.”

For example, since I consider silk pajamas my “work uniform,” so to speak, it is necessary that I conduct myself as someone who consciously practices educational capitalism.

I think the biggest problem adjuncts have with their work, online or on-ground, is understanding that they have to sell their education and skill set on the open market just like any other professional. There seems to be something embedded in the education of adjuncts, and the vast majority of graduate students today are being educated as adjuncts, that insists on an acceptance of poverty as an article of faith, and that this article of faith somehow gives them the freedom to complain about the horrors visited upon them by their unwillingness to at least internally reject their status.

When you decide to teach online, you must, in my opinion, decide how much to of your capital (education and skill set) to spend in order to make a profit.

With the number of online classes to teach today, it is foolish not to deliberately maximize one’s profits from online teaching.

Simply put, the online teacher who isn’t bringing in $800.00 to $1,000.00 per week after taxes needs to take a hard look at his or her business plan.