At a recent meeting of the McHenry County College Board, one of the items set for approval is the pay for part-time lecturers.

$1,550 per course.

Not much considering I got paid about $1,000 at Harper and Rockford Colleges in 1981. Lot of inflation since then.

And, not much, I guessed, compared to a full-time teacher’s salary.

I called the college to get this pretty public information and was told that I had to file a Freedom of Information request.

Sounded ridiculous to me, so I left a message on the voice mail of Christiana Haggerty, who handles things media and marketing.

Then I got this inspiration.

I have a master’s degree. Not to mention real life experience at the Federal, State and local levels of government. Politics, too, at the state and local levels.

I’m certainly qualified to teach things political and governmental. (Maybe I could teach a course in local governmental transparency, I thought later.)

I’ll just call back and ask what I would be paid, if I were hired.

I did and got another pleasant lady who said she thought the beginning salary was $40,000, but didn’t know the number of hours of teaching that would entail—different for different subjects, “labs,” I remembered.

She’d have her boss call me back.

Although it took two days to find out, I have been informed that lecturers must teach 15 classroom hours a week, plus spend five hours in “office hours.”

Naturally, there are other duties, including “class preparation, lab set-up, grading, student advising, program promotion, curricular development, departmental and division meetings, and College committee work.”

So, a part-timer teaches three hours and gets paid $1,500. That means the part-timer is getting paid $500 for each weekly hour in the classroom.

A beginning full-timer gets paid $2,667 per hour for his or her 15 hours of weekly classroom instruction.

There probably is a message here for how to save taxpayers money, especially since lots of well-paid (some over $100,000 a year), full-time teachers are retiring this year.

When it gets that high, the cost per credit hour rises to over $6,000 per hour.