well it seemed you wanted that parlegal position. i gathered you just weren't getting enough hours to pay the bills at the school. will the paralegal job on top of school give you at least forty hours?
No, I couldn't get enough income from even the 3 jobs at school. The admin job pays $15 and only gives me 8 hours a week. And that kept getting cut back. The placement readings paid well but they don't go on all semester long, so that gave me a burst of work/pay at the beginning and the end of a semester. They go on all summer long, but again, I'd only get readings in bursts (I'm not the only reader, so I have to share hours with other ESL readers). And my teaching hours are capped by the school - no adjunct is allowed to teach more than 10 classroom hours per week, which essentially works out to three classes. I've been teaching two classes - one class at 3 hours and the other at 5, so I have 8 classroom hours. Can't take a third class without going to 11 hours.
I had basically plateaued at the college. They hardly ever add full-time faculty lines and when they do, 9 times out of 10, they hire from outside the school. Adjuncts get screwed 6 ways to Sunday on a regular basis, so I knew it wasn't viable to keep the college as my sole source of income. I did my Paralegal Certificate at the college (one of the few perks I have for sticking around so long is that I get free tuition) and I figured at the very least, I can get a part-time job to supplement my income. It might turn into full time, which will then become my main income and I can supplement it by continuing to teach one class at the college (because I don't
really want to leave teaching. Not yet. Despite what I say every time I have to grade papers!)
So let's see...24 hours as a paralegal, 8 hours as a teacher, 8 hours as lackey in the support center...yup, I guess that adds up to exactly 40 hours a week.
Well, except the teaching work really involves a lot more hours than what I do in the classroom, but I'm only committed to 40 hours of being somewhere specifically to work. The rest of it happens at home or in a coffeehouse.