The students who are trying to add keep telling themselves that others will drop and make space for them. Uh…I don’t think so. Considering how hard it is to get classes now, I suspect that the enrolled ones will be in it for the long haul.
Maybe this will also make them take things more seriously. They sure seemed pretty serious on that first day.
Now if I could just get over this prickly heat rash on my chest…
You know who has the easiest lot in the world? College students. You know who has the next easiest lot? College faculty.
You’re an idiot.
First day was full of possibilities, like the possibility I’d catch another class before Mid-Term review. A sweet, if sleepy, time.
Gotta agree with Kimmy here. TAs are fucked. Associate profs need to show up now and then. Tenured profs can sleep all semester.
You also are an idiot.
What some morons don’t seem to realize is that the United States has somewhere around 2,000 four-year colleges and universities, and the vast majority of those don’t have Harvard-style teaching loads. There are hundreds of places where even tenured professors have what is called a 4-4 teaching load (4 courses per semester), and are also supposed to produce something in the way or research and/or publications.
In many of these colleges, there is simply no such thing as a TA. My wife is tenure-track faculty in the Cal State system, and they have no TAs to rely on when teaching their courses. The professors not only teach all their own classes, they do all their own grading as well.
When you are teaching 3 or 4 classes a semester, and doing all your own prep and grading, the teaching alone is easily a 40-hour-a-week job, usually more. This is the case in the humanities, anyway, where grading essays for a class of 50 or 100 students can literally take days if you want to do it properly, with proper feedback on their work. And none of that even touches on the service requirements (faculty committees, job search committees, student advising, etc.) that academics have to do, nor on the fact that if you actually want to get tenure, you need to produce some peer-reviewed articles or a scholarly monograph or two.
And for all of this you go to college for four years, getting pretty much straight A’s all along the way, and then spend anywhere from 4-7 years getting your PhD, to be rewarded in most cases with a salary in the princely range of $40,000 - $60,000 for an Assistant Professor.
Yes, the profs at the top 50 or so research universities have it pretty damn good, as far as teaching goes. But some of these folks also put out multiple field-changing articles and books over the course of their career. And there are literally thousands of professors, at all levels from Assistant Prof through to full Professor, who get by with high teaching loads, modest salaries, and the same sort of constant productivity pressures that you would get in some mid-level business job.
I’m not arguing that it’s the worst job in the world. It clearly isn’t, and it has a lot of rewards. But many of the traditional benefits of being a prof (getting to teach what you want; determining the direction of your own research; spending your summers doing work on things you love; setting your own hours) are being gradually undermined by the demands of teaching, and by budget cuts that pay professors less and expect them to do more.
As i said earlier, the Cal State and UC systems have just cut faculty and staff salaries across the board, have jacked up tuition, and are currently contemplating increasing teaching loads even further next semester. And it’s not just California, and it’s not just public universities.
That was me last year, but now I’m in grad school, where I have to deal with the fact that I spent last year bumming around and not learning very much (or making any money). Today is my first day of classes - TA-ing in the morning, and then a seminar in the afternoon on a subject that I don’t know very much about. I’ve never been “the dumb kid” in a class before, but there’s a first time for everything! I completely bombed a proficiency exam on Monday; not the end of the world, since I have a couple more semesters to try to pass it, but still embarrassing.
What the two of you don’t seem to realize is that colleges don’t all fall into the model you’re describing. I teach at a community college, and my current semester’s teaching load is 7 classes - three face-to-face, four online. The expectation is 5/5, but I usually teach more because if I only teach the expected, I make less than the median salary in my state for something with a Bachelor’s degree (I have a Masters). I have what passes for tenure at this level, but I can’t sleep all semester. And that is the norm for most college faculty, I would say, rather than the exception.
In addition to lesson plans, teaching, grading, office hours, etc., to prepare for my actual classes, I have expected committee work and other “service to the college” and “service to the community” requirements.
Believe me, I recognize that there are many many things about my job that are wonderful, and that many workers in America do not have. But I, frankly, am fucking SICK AND TIRED of hearing this bullshit. I work hard on my lesson plans, my classes, my assignments, my grading, my assisting students through the difficult parts of the concepts.
My students also work hard, many of them coming back to school for the first time in years after having lost their jobs in this economy, or changing careers. Many of them have families and some are still working as well as going to school.
So, on their behalf, I would like to say please cut this out. Yes, some faculty members do a half-ass job (as do some of your co-workers, and, dare I say it, you do sometimes in your job). Yes, some college students are whiny precious little snowflakes (read Rate Your Students). But the realities are far more complex than either of you seem to realize, and I know you’re both smart enough to recognize that.
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I teach one class today, and one tomorrow. It’s year three for today’s class, so I think I know how to do it pretty well. Students are fired up and Blackboard has cooperated so far. No complaints on that end.
Can I pit my summer productivity? Nowhere near the amount of things I wanted to get done.
I will pit the usual cluelessness of students on the first day of school. Riding two abreast on the road. Crossing the street without looking. Congregating in the middle of the halls, right in front of escalators.
I know you’re excited/panicked to be back, but let’s use some of that fancy learnin’ to observe some common sense and etiquette, eh?
Just to back up mhendo and Kolga one of my teachers I know has 7 classes totaling 20 credit hours. I have him for 4 of my 5 classes including the the 8:30 AM to 9:30 PM Thursday classes, except aerobics.
Also school is just all their is for only a subset of the population. Many (most I’d even put fourth) students have side jobs to pay the bills and stuff, in addition many take out loans to finance their education. Loans have to be paid back with money earned after graduation. So it isn’t like it’s a free easy ride, even if you consider homework easy*. They have to work to pay that back.
*big if, English Composition about killed me. >.<
Oh, man. Me too. I was supposed to completely rewrite my Post-war Europe notes to bring them in line with the new direction the AP test is going. Total accomplished: Zero. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.
And I actually have the gall to berate the students about not doing their homework. I’m a bad person. I should be spanked. Hard.
Anyone?
Excellent post. I’m at a CC as well.
Many adjunct faculty work on multiple campuses just to make ends meet, so they don’t exactly lead a cushy life with lots of time to sit around and do nothing.
As for the students here–sure, some are flaky. That happens everywhere. But most of them, especially now, are here to work, study, and get a job of some kind if they don’t already have one. I’ve got at least two who work a graveyard shift before coming to a 7:30am class.
Really? Because when teacher’s in this thread complain about low “summer productivity” (Spoiler alert: in the real world, you have to work throughout the whole year!), it sort of undermines your claim.
Actually most schools have summer classes. All the work of a full semester compressed down to the summer. Those are almost always the hardest for teachers and students alike.
Yep–18 or 16 weeks compressed into six, four days a week, constant testing, writing, grading, etc.
I work in the “real world” and I complain about summer productivity, too. Every professor, school teacher, and grad student I know works summers. My friend complains that his productivity was not high enough in his own research because he was too busy, yanno, working.
No apostrophe.
F.
I taught four classes this summer semester, so there’s that. In addition, when people talk about low summer productivity, don’t you think that implies that we’re actually, you know, working? Most K-12 teachers I know work during the summer, revamping lesson plans, rewriting courses (as silenus meant to do), taking classes to get certified, etc. My colleagues and I work during the summer - I teach and did department chair duties, others of my colleagues took classes or taught classes, we all revamped websites due to an upcoming migration to a different online course management system…
So, really, I believe you’re trying to imply that you and all of your non-educator colleagues work at 100% of capacity 100% of the time with nary a second of chatting around the water cooler, hanging out during lunch for longer than you “should,” surfing the web at work, while those of us who are educators are lazy and complaining.
On behalf of all of us - bite me.
One more thing about adjunct faculty: many of them find themselves without classes to teach now in summer and winter intersessions–if colleges can even afford to have those short sessions anymore. Since they don’t work on a regular contract, they are unemployed and have no guarantee of a job for the fall or spring. So they spend what you think of as “down time” trying to get other work. As shocking as it may sound to you, they don’t make a big fat pile of dough that they can live off of comfortably when they’re not assigned classes.