Lecturers should be full time employees of their institution. Paying them as part timers forces them to seek employment elsewhere to obtain health care benefits (in the US anyway), and to earn sufficient income to meet expenses. This is bad for educators and students as it makes teaching secondary to their primary means of income. Teachers, college instructors, lecturers, professors: these are all educational PROFESSIONALS and need to be recognized and treated as such.

Classroom teaching is draining. It may seem easy to stand before a class for 1-3 hours to lecture, but it is not. I am tired after every class. It takes a great deal of concentration to prepare and present the material for the day, engage students in meaningful discussion, collect and grade assignments, and to prepare, give, and grade exams. Then there's lab and clinic.

Clinic is both easy and hard. Easy because I'm so experienced with patient care that I know what is happening with each patient (I often know more about their patients than the students do) and what needs to be done, and the environment is so familary. Hard because I have to make sure the students are doing what they are supposed to at the right times, in the right way. Passing meds can be painfully slow because the students are so nervous.

Of all the things I do in my job, giving exams is the most difficult. It's challenging to either find or write exam questions that will challenge the students, that are fair, and that target their knowledge and ability to critically think. I have to analyze the questions after the exam: sometimes a question that looked fine before the exam turns out to have two keyable answers, or is miskeyed on my scantron, or is unfair and has to be thrown out.

Even as a full time employee, my pay is not what I would be making as a full time nurse in the clinical setting. But that is balanced out by other perks: I don't have to pay a premium on my health insurance (just my dental, and vision), I get the state pension (and North Carolina's is excellent), plus a 403b (similar to a 401K), and I earn sick time and comp time. I'm not tenure track (no one in the community college system is), but I have a secure job and know I can keep for as long as I want to (which will be awhile--I love teaching).

When I started teaching, I didn't know much about HOW to teach. You don't have to at the college level, at least in the US. I learned from my colleagues and from seminars I began attending on the latest trends in educating nursing students. Our department is big on getting its instructors that knowledge of how to teach effectively, and we use evidence based practice in our teaching as much in our nursing practice.

This is an important point: part time faculty are usually disinterested in learning the profession of teaching. They have no incentive to; it's just a part time job and they have to put their continuing education focus into their full time jobs. This dilutes the quality of educators.

One of the things in the US University system that drives me nuts is all the research "professors" who don't teach a single class, and are there to only do research to pump up the university's reputation. They are paid top dollar while professors who are truly invested in teaching are treated like second class citizens. In the long run, this trend is going to ruin our higher education system. It's already becoming so expensive that it's becoming increasingly unaffordable.