Am I the only unemployed person on the planet who’s working like an animal so as to get a break from working like an animal?
Under normal circumstances, I’ve been working 14 to 17 hours a day on my various underpaid enterprises. Since Fall semester began, I’ve had to let FaM slide, simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the work I was doing on the blog and keep up with three classes and edit arcane copy from the academic set. It’s all I can do to crank one idle essay, not very personal-financeish, each day; I’ve minimized the Alexis toolbar; and I never did figure out how on earth to get into the Yakezi site, so I’ve presumably fallen off that outfit’s rolls. People keep tweeting me that they’re following me on Twitter, and if they’re clearly PF bloggers, I’ll return the favor…but who has time to post on Twitter and Facebook???
{whine!}
So, by way of resolving this whine, I’m determined to give myself a vacation during the winter break, instead of spending the entire month between mid-December and mid-January working nonstop to prepare courses. It takes days to get one of these things lined up, each day planned for, a 15-page syllabus written, a three-page calendar constructed, and everything set up in the endlessly difficult Blackboard.
I’m almost done with the spring English 102 sections, both of which are in-class face-to-face sections. I’ve come up with a number of strategies:
1. Make almost all the learning exercises and quizzes zero-credit affairs. Tell students it’s their responsibility to learn the material, that they’re expected to demonstrate mastery of the skills and knowledge imparted, and that if they expect to get decent grades on the papers they’ll be well-advised to do these things.
This will relieve me of a vast amount of ditzy grading and score-keeping. It cuts the number of grade-book columns from twenty to nine.
2. Convert the exercises and quizzes from open-book homework to in-class activities. Have students spend half the endless class period working them and then use the rest of the time to discuss them.
This turns every no-credit exercise into about 75 teaching moments. It relieves me from having to figure out how to keep them entertained to fill 40 hours with lecture.
3. See to it that the only graded assignments are those that are required by the district: the drafts, the peer reviews, and the final papers, representing the so-called “recursive process” applied to three required papers.
Why give myself extra work if it’s not required? Especially since I’m not paid to do extra work!
4. Load the final paper, which is 2,500 words long, with three times the credit of the two shorter papers, each of which is 750 words. Their final paper will carry 300 points and the two lesser papers 100 points.
Believe me when I say this will get their attention.
5. Require that drafts for the two shorter papers be at least 300 words long, and the draft for the final paper be at least 500 words.
This will eliminate the conundrum of what to do with students who slop together half a paragraph or a crude outline and expect me to waste my time assessing it.
6. Up the score value of the peer review exercise to 50 points, the same as the drafts themselves. Require students to follow a page-long set peer review guidelines to get full credit.
This will make it clear that I don’t have to assess the classic one-line “peer review” that says, succinctly, “This is very good. I saw a few grammer [sic] mistakes.”
7. Create a simplified grading rubric for drafts and peer reviews:
50 points: author does an honest job of filling the assignment; peer reviewer follows the entire set of guidelines.
40 points: author comes somewhere close to 300 words and at least looks like she or he is trying to get a decent start on the assignment; peer reviewer follows most of the guidelines.
35 points: half-baked job.
30 points: inadequate, but at least the person turned in a few words.
0 points: couldn’t be bothered to turn in anything.
8. Lose the computers delivered to the classroom. Limit in-class computer activities to drafting and peer reviewing, cutting the number of computer days from thirty-two to nine.
Having laptops delivered to the classroom turned out to be quite a hassle. And if the class consists entirely of 18- and 19-year-olds and does not have the counterbalance of older students, laptops in the classroom represent an invitation to party.
9. Remove all due dates from listings and descriptions of assignments online.
Contrary to what we’re taught by our course designers and urged to do by the administration, posting elaborate “modules” does little for the students, who don’t read them, and creates vast amounts of extra work for instructors. To recycle a Blackboard course, you have to spend untold numbers of hours combing through each section, subsection, and sub-subsection finding and changing the dates you stupidly inserted.
After this, there’ll be only two places where dates will be visible: the syllabus, and a week-by-week calendar. I have to rewrite those each semester anyway. This will make it simple to recycle courses; effectively all I’ll have to do is copy content from one BB shell to the next and then add the current syllabus and calendar.
10. Lose the endlessly annoying G.D. Blackboard quizzes! Convert them to ungraded in-class exercises.
These hateful things, while they conveniently provide machine-generated grades, are difficult or impossible to copy over and take hour after hour after interminable mind-numbing hour to reproduce each semester. Turning them into hand-outs to be used as the basis of in-class discussion will bring a stop, also, to the quibbling over scores on the things.
11. Combine the entire semester’s worth of hand-outs, quizzes, exercises, syllabus, and calendar into one gigantic PDF package, and send it to the copy center before the start of the semester.
This will eliminate countless fillings-out of copy center forms and countless trudges up and down the stairs to the copy center.
I can’t even count the number of hours I’ve spent trying to accomplish these steps—hours crammed in around the other hours devoted to keeping up with the courses, editing, and blogging. But I think it’ll be worth it: massive simplification should cut the amount of time I have to spend on teaching next semester, with little or no effect on the students’ learning. If anything, it may actually improve learning, since the students will have to focus on learning exercises in-class, rather than flaking off with them whenever they feel like it. Over time, too, it will cut the amount of work needed for course prep, since it effectively puts the courses in tin cans—all I’ll need to do in the future is write a calendar and change the due dates in the syllabus.
Hope it works.
Meanwhile…time to grade papers!
Image: Turda Salt Mine, Turda, Poland. Roamata. Public Domain.
I’ve been trying to develop assignments that just require DOING. For instance, my Intro to Lit students have to write (not copy/paste!) definitions for 50 terms and provide examples for 20. Everyone gets full credit for the assignment (if they do it); I only need to spot check.
Papers, of course, have to be graded.
Losing the dates is a good idea. Just do a weekly list: week 1, etc.
My students have to sign a statement saying they read the syllabus, yet most of them say they don’t read it! Or the posted assignments.
You NEED a vacation.
I absolutely detested the drafts and all that professors required. It stifled me. By the way, I have a BA in English, BA in Social and Behavioral Science, all 30 hours for MA in English, and a master’s in education. Yes, I am an English teacher!
I assume you teach writing. I cannot find the information on your blog. On that assumption, I am wondering why you don’t have a writing lab with computers so you could go there and not have the hassle of getting laptops.
It really annoyed me when a prof handed the class a syllabus with all the wrong dates. Then, we had to spend precious class time making corrections, with the prof backpeddling and correcting the corrections!
Blackboard should have all the kinks worked out by now! It’s been about four years since I have had any dealings with it. Fortunately, the prof gave us several ways to send papers. I thought I was just not as tech-savvy as I prided myself on being when I could not send her a paper or make the required comments on BB. Nope, it was not working. So, we could email papers to her.
Oh, I do love to write papers. I asked permission to write write a 30-page paper when 10 pages was the requirement. The prof put an A+ and all sorts of compliments on it, along with the suggestion to publish it. I didn’t.
@ Practical Parsimony: I teach freshman comp and magazine writing. In composition, we are required to teach writing as a recursive process. This process entails developing and focusing a topic; outlining; research; drafting; peer reviewing; and final revision, editing, and proofreading. It’s a knee-jerk approach to a creative process, but it’s what we’re hired to do. If you get caught doing something else, you’re unlikely to be rehired.
The college does have a few writing labs. However, we are not allowed to use them every day! Well…obviously: if everyone wanted to get their students into a lab every day, they wouldn’t fit.
At ASU, every single one of my writing courses took place in computer classrooms. So, to my mind, trying to teach writing without computers is very clumsy, and grading hard-copy papers is excruciatingly time-consuming, to say nothing of promoting writer’s cramp.
Blackboard came out with version 9 this fall. It is pure, unmitigated bloatware. The program was always glitchy and unintuitive; version 9 improves on that with new, improved, and more frequent glitches, and with a raft of obscure new functions. Right out of the box the first week of class, the damn thing crashed; it stayed down for the better part of a week.
E-mailing a paper to a person who receives upwards of 100 messages a day practically guarantees that your paper will get lost.
When I taught upper-division writing courses at ASU, I had 120 students a semester. Think about that, please. If each one of 120 students turns in a 10-page paper, the instructor has to read and try to comment intelligently upon 1,200 pages, most of it, I’m afraid, drivel. How often do you sit down and read a 1,200-page book and assess it and enter instructive comments in it in the course of one week? Try to imagine what that entails. Now multiply it by the number of assignments a composition course requires — at my school, four for English 101 and three for English 102.
One English 102 class requires the instructor to read 4,750 words per student, or a total of 118,750 words per section. A standard workload for an adjunct is three sections; thus the adjunct instructor has to read, comment upon and assess 356,250 words first in draft and then in final form. Full-time junior-college instructors teach five sections a semester, producing 593,750 words per semester to read, comment upon, and assess in draft and then again in final form.
By the time you’ve read both drafts and final copy, you’ve read, commented, upon, and assessed 712,500 words if you’re an adjunct or 1.19 million words if you’re full-time. You have 16 weeks in which to do that.
Tolstoy’s War and Peace is only 500,000 words long, in English translation. Few readers are asked to comment upon it, advise the author on ways to improve his writing, and assign a grade to it.
When a student turns in more than the requested number of pages, she or he adds that much more to the instructor’s workload. When you ask the instructor to read 30 pages in response to a ten-page assignment, you ask him or her to read the work of not one but three students. The person is not paid to teach, say, 33 students; he’s paid to teach 30. The rate here to teach one four-month course is $2,400, and that, in comparison to adjunct pay nationwide, is pretty generous. That’s $600 a month, $450 net. Thus asking the person to take on the equivalent of three extra students isn’t very fair.
Can you lobby to NOT use Blackboard? (That may be a very naive question – I have no idea what Blackboard actually is.)
@ Ellen2: We’re not required to use Blackboard. Many people don’t. But then everything has be be done in hard copy. For a composition course, this means you get piles and piles and PILES of papers, many of them written in longhand. It’s hard to keep track of the stuff, and for me, at least, it’s much faster to read and mark copy online than with a pen.
Just a thought for emailing papers – why not tell students to use a label (i.e. Final – Student’s Name) then tell gmail that any email that starts with Final goes to a different folder.
Just a thought, but doesn’t generally solve your overall time constraints.
@ Evan: Students post their papers to Blackboard, either in a kind of blogoid format (which allows for peer review or for the instructor to check off entries very quickly) or in a function called “Assignments,” which ties into the electronic grade sheet. So as long as they use BB, their submissions self-segregate.
They risk death or, worse, a lost paper if they dare to send me an assignment by e-mail.
LOL! You can tell them to use labels (or just about anything else you please) until you’re blue in the face. They can not hear you. They are stone deaf to any such blandishments. It’s a universal learning disability.
FAM, I do understand the requirements of writing, having taught it myself and been subjected to the tortorous processes as a student. FAIR? I asked him. He could say, “NO!”. That is all that is required. He said he did not think I could even support my subject with ten pages, that my premise did not even exist in Thoreau. I had to submit my idea for a paper topic to be approved. Then, I asked for permission to write the 30-page paper. The prof and I were close as student and prof can be without being out of bounds. He only had 8 students in the graduate class. He was not teaching a writing course, so he read only the final paper.
Once, I pointed out to him a statement by a character in a book we were studying and how her statement was important because it foreshadowed all the action to come. This same prof said he had read the book twice a year for 30 years and had never seen that statement. I think he wanted to read my 30-page paper. I got an A+ for material he did not think could be supported by my reading of Thoreau.
I did not mean to irritate you.
The professor was fielding calls and emails from students because BB did NOT work. She TOLD us to email them to her. We tried and the system failed. She said to email the papers because she would have twice as much work to do if she waited until the system was back up. Yes, I know that normally a prof would not want emails with papers. But, it was NOT our decision to email her.
@ Practical Parsimony: Ooops! Didn’t mean to sound irritated! Wasn’t irritated. 😀
I tend to get kind of passionate about the absurd overwork to which certain kinds of highly exploitable faculty are subjected. It really is inexcusable. They’re not exploited by their students; they’re exploited by institutions that pay a person with a master’s in business management more than a Ph.D. in English or history…and a young editor with a master’s or a Ph.D. less in a week than she can earn in five hours of waiting tables at Appleby’s.
Most faculty members, no matter what their department, are so thrilled to stumble upon a good writer they will cheerfully let you turn in 30 pages. Reading the work of a gifted student is a welcome relief from the thousands of pages of drech that clutters one’s desk. That’s why I welcome a difficult essay or technical report from a young Ph.D. or ABD, even as I’m wading through a deep puddle of freshman scribbling. It eases the mind.
Blackboard truly is a pain. When you’re having to accept papers by ordinary e-mail, it’s especially irritating. I also have had to let students submit assignments by e-mail. Problem is, it really does make it easy to lose the student’s paper. No matter what I try to do to intercept and bounce off irrelevant messages from the prolific announcers at the District’s many colleges, I still end up with something more than 100 incoming messages a day. A daily deluge like that makes it hard to keep track of the stuff that matters.