Cover Story

http://www.What'sYour URL?

by Chris Cumo

Christina Aguilera, that hard, commercial look in her eyes, lures teenage boys to http://www.christinaaguilera.com. Johann Sebastian Bach, dead 253 years is alive at http://www.jsbach.org. Even Piltdown Man, who was never a man, has a Web page at home.tiac.net/~cri_a/ graphics/pskull.gif. If a pop icon, a dead man and a hoax have Web pages, surely part-time faculty can stake their claim to Cyberspace.

As they do adjuncts might forgive Aguilera her obnoxious preening. Her material-girl instincts sharper than daggers, Aguilera knows how to captivate her audience. Part-time faculty need these instincts to court their audience: students or customers or whatever one calls them these days. Paul J. Watson, research assistant professor of behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque knows the game.

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Going The Distance

How to Ace a Virtual Interview

by Evelyn Beck

First off, to nab an on-line teaching job, you had better know your way around the Internet.

“The main thing I look for is somebody who’s got a degree of comfort on-line, who has navigated Web sites, set up e-mail,” says Catherine Flynn, Director of Faculty for the School of Arts & Sciences for Kaplan College Online. “I had an instructor once who applied to teach on-line who cut and pasted her résumé into an e-mail message instead of sending it as an attachment; that didn’t bode well for teaching on-line. Another asked about the possibility of doing face-to-face instead of on-line training; somebody who wants hands-on training isn’t a good candidate, either.”

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Lesko Blog

Monday Morning

Posted: January 28th, 2008

Listen to my blog entry here.

I spent Sunday morning filing out my tax forms. I actually don't mind doing it. It's just that it takes so much time. We use a computerized accounting program for personal finances, and that makes it exponentially easier to gather together the necessary data. I try to envision my entire chunk of a federal tax bill going toward, say, Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, Sleeping Bear National Park, Hiawatha National Forest--all national parks in Michigan that I've visited any times. I think taxpayers should be able to opt out of having their tax dollars go to fund certain things, say, the military. That way, there could be, literally, no blank check for war. When the Pentagon ran out of tax money alloted to it, well, the generals of the Joint Chiefs could hold raffles and bake sales.

Monday mornings usually find me playing a bit of catch up from the previous Friday. I never seem to get everything done on Fridays that I need to. I also do quite a bit of reading on Mondays, and make an effort to answer all of the unanswered email from the previous week. On Sunday, I received an email in response to the latest issue of the e-Advocate Newsletter complaining that the Adjunct Advocate needs to devote more editorial space to solutions aimed at wiping out the exploitation of part-time faculty. I replied to the email, and invited the author to contribute an essay. I asked her to write about how she decided to stop teaching as an adjunct. In her email, she said she would rather flip burgers than work as a part-timer. I look forward to her piece.

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