Education falls short in night classes

I am  a student and  I come to school to learn, and based on my experience with night classes at SCC, they are not always the best means of achieving this.

While I appreciate the fact that SCC offers classes that accommodate the working student (me), the bulk of them are seriously lacking in quality instruction. 

Few evening classes have lived up to the standard that I have come to expect from SCC, but they do exist.  Its just that the poor efforts of some teachers have tarnished the reputation for all evening classes in my book.

I am not surprised though; these teachers are usually working a full-time job or have retired and are looking to make some extra money.  In the retirees’ case, they usually have not changed the lesson plan for years, which makes an excellent remedy for insomnia.

Night teachers are usually adjunct faculty, which is a fancy way to say part-time, which apparently translates to: this class isn’t very important to me and I’m going to demonstrate that with mind numbingly boring classes that lack content, and oh yeah, I won’t even take the time to learn your name.

It is plausible that the root of this problem lies within the hiring process or lack there of.
When full-time teachers are hired, they are subjected to an intense process beginning with a micro-teach (a practice lesson in front of a committee).  The committee then chooses the best candidate based off the micro-teach and conducts a committee interview.  Next, the decision must get the go-ahead from the Vice President of Academic Affairs.  Finally, the district governing board must approve the applicant.

On the other hand, adjunct faculty simply submits their qualifications, do an interview with the division chair and they are hired if they present themselves well.

It is equally important to subject part-time teachers to the same scrutiny that the full-time faculty teachers receive.  After all, part-time professors teach 60 percent of the students in the MCCCD school district.

When adjunct faculty affect almost two-thirds of the student body, it is imperative that they measure up to the quality of the full-time faculty.

Its not that teachers who teach evening classes don’t want their students to succeed; they do, perhaps a bit too much.  They make their classes so simple that a student just needs to be present to pass.

I have learned my lesson though, I will no longer be paying (time and money) for night classes where teachers care little about student’s academic achievement and only want students to pass their class so it looks good on the end-of-semester review.