I'm amazed that any college hired someone as a full-time professor that didn't have even a high-school diploma, much less an undergraduate or post-graduate degree. How exactly did that work?
Just curious - I know it's off topic, so feel free to ignore me.
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No problem asking. I like to answer this question, because I know there are more people out there that would like the chance to teach, but don't have the paper degree. I should write a how-to article on this...
When I taught full-time, it was at a black college in the 60's. They were happy to get anyone that knew the material, regardless of any other detail. Simply telling the dean that I had successfully tutored at Wofford (a "rich" white school), and demonstrating I knew the material (both physics and calculus) to a professor by scoring a near perfect on each of the class's final exams, was enough for them. Now, the world is a different place, and thankfully, black colleges have an easier time finding instructors.
How to get a job now? I've reviewed a lot of books over the years for a publisher. If you make intelligent comments about the material, and contact the professor later, you will get help. Usually, the publishers try to keep the authors in the dark about who wrote a review, but you can work around that. It's not as hard as it sounds, because textbooks are so large, even a neophyte can find things to fix in an unfinished draft if they look hard enough. So, talk to a publisher about reviewing drafts. The job pays next to nothing, but it's an easy-in with a professor. This was how I landed a job teaching, the best class I have ever had or taught(!), a microprocessor interfacing course. I did the tedious work of hooking-up circuits to test every single one of the circuits in the draft text book, and made a tremendous number of corrections to both the schematics and the text. It wasn't that I knew that much more than the professor (not at all!), but that I went to the trouble of trying it out. When I asked if I could teach the class, the professor went to bat for me without even asking about my education.
Another good method to get a job teaching, is to find-out what classes the professors don't want to teach or what classes don't have a professor scheduled to teach. If it's near (or after, from what I've seen at Clemson!) the beginning of the semester, and the class doesn't have a professor, then you have a chance. I got to teach a linear algebra class, because there was, literally, no one else that wanted it. The school was going to cancel the class, and leave seven poor students out in the cold. I've gotten to teach a few EE classes, because I found-out that it was after the first class meeting, and there wasn't an official instructor yet. If you find a professor that doesn't want to teach a class, you can get help getting onboard to teach.
Finally, if you're dead-set on teaching, but can't land a job at a college, tech schools are a great fallback. Most have many more classes that they'd like to offer than they can find teachers. I've never taught at one, but I still get a call a few times per year from three different tech schools. None have asked "what degrees do you have?" Instead, they ask "are you willing to teach this?"z