That is probably true.
What about an historian at a local museum? Sounds like a respectable role in the community and there would be reason to appear regularly on local TV and newspapers getting interviewed, but I can’t imagine there’s a lot of money in it.
Yes, yes, the Cappadocians. Fine.
The historian at a museum may well also be a college professor. A lot of museums are run by universities, and even those that aren’t are likely to have various affiliations and overlaps with them.
I don’t know which type is more common, and I suspect that it depends on the field.* But I know that over the past 5-10 years I’ve read a number of articles about people who don’t want to be adjuncts - they want to be full-time tenured professors with health insurance and other benefits but can’t get a tenure track position and instead spend years cobbling together a sort of full-time job from adjunct positions at multiple colleges. I mean, just as a comparison, I know substitute teachers in my public school system don’t get benefits , aren’t paid the same as full time teachers and aren’t guaranteed any work at all in a given year. And I know people sometimes take substitute positions while they wait to be hired for a full time position while others want a substitute position because they don’t want a full-time job. But what I’ve never heard of is someone who continues as a substitute for 10 or 15 years because they never were hired for a full-time position - apparently either nobody who is hired as a sub but wants a full-time position fails to get one ( which I find unlikely ) or people realize long before they get to 10 years that a full-time position isn’t in the cards for them and look for a job outside of the public school system.
*Most of the ones I’ve known have been in social sciences or law ( the lawyers tend to teach courses like “Law for Criminal Justice Professionals” rather than at a law school) , a couple of accountants who naturally teach accounting courses and a couple of high school science teachers who were adjunct professors at a local college apparently to enable their AP bio students to get credit at that college. The articles I’ve read tend to be about adjuncts in different fields - English or other languages and history come to mind.
You really believe that? I thought it was an open secret that the various “Superman-diamonds” souvenir shops you see in Metropolis are all just part of a front for conflict diamonds. The authorities look the other way because… you know, Superman. He reigns over us like a god.
You sure do make a strong case, Doctor Holurt!
Oh, sure, the souvenirs. Everyone knows Superman didn’t actually make those (or at least, all the locals-- I’m sure some dumb Gothamite or Center City tourists are fooled). Genuine Superman diamonds are all registered with all sorts of paperwork to prove their authenticity, and he carves a serial number in them with his heat vision.
That’s the part I don’t quite understand. Surely they could, if they so chose, get jobs as high school teachers or doing something else besides that sort of desperate struggle. So why do they choose that particular path? Is it misguided pride and the feeling that they so want to be college professors, that they’ll rather do that adjunct business, rather than just admit defeat and teach high school (with all the retirement and health benefits that come with it?)
In a couple of cases I know of the folks are terrible teachers. They’d never get a job teaching in a high school classroom. In one case his English is too poor. In another case she’s unbelievably arrogant and unapproachable.
Third tier state schools seem to have no qualms about putting people who are crap at teaching into the classroom. Especially in classes like Chemistry 101 or Biology 101 classes. To be fair, some of the students have no business being in a college classroom either.
Judging by the content and writing style of the rate my professor feedback on these two.
You can add chef to that list. Sure, the celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Bobby Flay rake in the dollars and fame, but the vast majority of chefs are condemned to a life of long hours, terribly pay and working conditions, difficulty in maintaining a functional social life, just to mention a few.
Yep. Based only on reading the late Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly I would have to agree that most chefs’ lives are pretty hard and unappreciated.
Why “surely”? For one thing, teaching high school (at least in a public school) requires training and certification that aren’t required to teach college; and for another, what if there aren’t any openings in their subject in their area?
It’s not just third-tier schools. In my early university years I went to one of the top-tier universities in Canada. The thing that really astounded me was the tremendous night-and-day difference between the regular curriculum that I started out in (engineering) and the honours curriculum that I transferred to (Honours Science). The former had generally large classrooms, often taught either by teaching assistants or sometimes even by videotaped lectures, with the halls manned by grad students to minimize any disruptions. The honours classes were small and taught by professors who were generally enthusiastic about the subject matter that was their life work and were all the more motivated by having an appreciative audience.
The labs were great, too. The first time I went into a lab (physics lab, I think) in the honours program, based on my previous experience I naively asked what I was supposed to do. The answer was: based on what you’ve learned so far, what do you want to do? What do you want to explore with the equipment available here? It blew my mind. Transferring from regular to honours was like switching to a completely different school. Later on I transferred to a different university where the differences were less stark – all the undergrads were basically treated fairly well. The former place seemed more interested in preserving their research reputation than in educating the majority of their undergrads.
There’s a world of difference between being a college lecturer and a high school teacher, even if the curriculum is similar.
In college the students are there mostly of their own choice, and they want to learn the material.
In high school a lot of kids are in the class simply because it’s required, and have no interest in the material at all. In fact they deliberately try to annoy the teacher and disrupt the class. Knowing how to deal with that is an entirely different skill from simply knowing the material.
My son is trying to get a job teaching at college. He’s not interested in teaching high school for this reason. He doesn’t want to babysit kids who are required by law to be in his class.
He’s probably going to end up working in computer science, and not teaching, because good teaching jobs at the college level are hard to come by without a PhD, and he’s really not interested in writing a thesis, nor in doing research as a professor.
Absolutely. They’re significantly different jobs, and there’s a lot that high school teachers have to put up with that college teachers don’t. However…
Anybody who teaches college (at least somewhere other than a highly selective college) expecting this to be true is likely to be disappointed. It’s truer for college than for high school, but…
- Just because they’re in college doesn’t mean it was their own choice (as opposed to their parent’s).
- Just because they chose to go to college doesn’t mean they’re there for the academics (as opposed to the parties or the athletics).
- Just because they’re there for the academics doesn’t mean they’re interested in learning (as opposed to just getting a degree or credential).
- Just because they’re interested in learning doesn’t mean they’ve taken your particular class by choice (it could be a required class).
I’m not convinced this is the proper approach for an undergrad, even an honors undergrad. Designing experiments is a difficult skill, and there are plenty of very good experiments with very interesting results that can be performed and analyzed by undergrads, but which most folks would be very unlikely to come up with. And a lot of the equipment is used for very specialized purposes, that someone untrained in it might not even realize that it’s possible to do.
As an example, if I showed you an instructional lab which contained, among its many other pieces of equipment, a laser and a machinist’s rule marked in millimeters, would it have ever occurred to you to use that ruler to measure the wavelength of the laser? Would it have even occurred to you that it was possible to do so? Even if I had told you that I wanted to know the laser’s wavelength, would it have occurred to you that the machinist’s rule would be the piece of equipment to reach for?
I may be forgetting some of the details (it’s scary how long ago this was – there may still have been dinosaurs around) but definitely the philosophy was along the lines of “design an experiment to demonstrate something interesting that you learned about”. Whatever constraints or guidance there may have been that I’ve forgotten about, it was a dramatic departure from what I had been used to, where basically you followed a set procedure step by step. I do remember enjoying the approach. And of course the things you came up with were a big part of your grading.
I think the economics must be that any profession that is viewed by some portion of society as “prestigious” must have the prestige itself considered as part of overall compensation. Want to be called “Professor” by college students? Okay, show up to class and you’ll get $3K per course per semester for the privilege. Don’t like it? Okay, Mister Wannabe, good luck finding a tenure track position with your PhD from a second-tier state school that doesn’t even confer sufficient bona fides to your “credentials” to allow you to teach at a third-tier state school. Not for real money, anyway. Now, if you’ve reconsidered and would like some monopoly money and a shared office with a desk accessible to you for an hour before and an hour after each class, we might still be willing to help you out with that… Professor?
And my experience as a naval officer (brought up earlier and then debunked as a hi-prestige/lo-pay job–the pay isn’t exactly “low”) suggests the corollary to the “prestige as compensation” proposition I’ve just outlined: if it turns out your “high prestige” job is actually pretty decent when it comes to salary, then you’re liable to find out it doesn’t exactly feel “prestigious” doing it.
Exceptions and caveats for the high end of the profession.