The interview at Glendale Community College went well. I think. But then…what do I know?
Their strategy is to hand you a C-level student paper and ask you to grade it in 15 minutes. Then they take a half hour during which you are to respond to six questions. So it’s a whirlwind trip that can’t possibly reveal very much about any one candidate other than how he combs his hair or whether she brushes her teeth.
A friend had clued me that Glendale prides itself on its high-tech pedagogy and that its leadership is committed to the Student Success Initiative, and so I had several related buzzwords on my tongue. Probably if I was weak on anything it was on pedagogical theory. I don’t do theory well. I teach by the seat of my pants. Generally I come out about where the theorists would like, but I don’t get there the same way.
So, we shall see.
We may see fairly soon: they’re hiring for January! We’re already a third of the way through November. They’ll have to select a hire soon, in order to get the person on the payroll by the time spring classes begin. Surely they’ll make a decision by the middle of December.
Full-time faculty at the community colleges here teach five and five: five sections a semester. That is a huge workload, especially for English faculty, who teach almost nothing but composition courses. A few senior people manage to land survey of lit courses, but most are teaching comp and remedial sections.
It’s unlikely Glendale Community College will hire me into the full-time position for which I’m interviewing next week. But just in case… It might be good to know how one would handle a very workful job like that.
Writing courses, of which composition is a variant, are extremely work-intensive. Students learn by writing and by getting feedback from knowledgeable readers. This means you not only have to grade their opuses, you have to try to comment intelligently on them. It’s a tall order when you’re looking at 100 or more students. How can any human being possibly grade that many papers, week in and week out, without dying of overwork?
Just now I’m using rubrics—lists of criteria agreed upon by the instructor and the students—to grade their papers. The rubric strategy allows me to gloss over errors that are outside the assignment’s parameters, including some issues that, in earlier incarnations, I would have attacked. So: when one limits oneself strictly to a set of rubrics, how long does it take to grade a set of papers?
The Monday students at Paradise Valley turned in the final drafts of their second essays last week. I brought the kitchen timer into the study, and here was the result:
Difference between the mean and the average time required to grade the first 11 papers that I read was negligible. All in all, it takes about 19 minutes per 750-word paper, if you’re moving fast and not being too picky. Probably requires a little more, since I neglected to start the timer just as I started some of those papers. At about 20 minutes per paper, how long should it take to plow through an entire section’s Golden Words?
The District caps composition classes at 25, but as a practical matter quite a few students drop during the first few weeks, so sizes should average around 20. So six hours and 30 or 40 minutes is probably a reasonable estimate of the time it would take to grade one set of papers from one class
It doesn’t count count the many distractions and extra work-makers that interfere, however. While I read these papers, for example, my computer crashed twice; the phone rang several times; the dog pestered me now and again; my client sent a raft of new documents to read; the choir director asked me to write a few lines of copy; and several times I had to google students’ factoids and assertions, leading me to wander the labyrinths of the Internet. So the activity of grading can be pretty gestalt. There’s no way you could get 6 2/3 uninterrupted hours to just sit down and get the job done.
But let’s suppose the total amount of time required to read one raft of papers came to only 6.67 hours. An instructor can control the number of papers that arrive at a single time by a) refusing to accept late papers and b) staggering the classes’ due dates. If you were skilled at this, could you limit your workload to no more than 40 hours a week?
Interesting!
In theory, you could accept as many as four sets of papers in a week without having to put in a 50- or 60-hour work week.
In reality, of course, that’s outrageous. In the first place, full-time faculty do a lot more than teach: they’re involved in faculty governance; they tutor and advise students one-on-one; and they enjoy endless, mind-numbing meetings. So three rafts of papers are probably about as much as you could handle in a normal week—that assumes you’d only have about five hours of meetings, student conferences, and other activities, a conservative estimate.
If you could engineer things so that you never had more than two sets of papers due in a single week, about 30 hours of class time and grading time would leave plenty of hours for the rest of the shenanigans involved in a full-time teaching job and allow you to have your evenings and weekends to yourself. More or less.
The take-away message here, if there is one, is that if you have any control over the due dates of incoming work, you should be able to keep a fairly large workload within reasonable bounds. It relates to my earlier theme day idea: don’t regard all the work that comes pouring in as one huge mass that has to be done right this minute. Map out priorities for the work, identify due dates, and schedule or delay tasks out in front of you, fairly close to the times when they’re due.
The reason I felt theme days were not going to work is that I’d failed to break free of the feeling that everything has to be done right away. Faced with two rafts of papers, page proofs for a large and challenging publication, a steady tattoo of new documents to edit from a client, a mountain of laundry, a filthy house, parched house plants, a garden in need of attention, a pool ditto, and an especially busy choir week, I started to panic.
The truth is, though, not everything has to be done right now. Recognizing that fact and putting it to work for you can go a long way toward freeing you from workload oppression.
So earlier this week, I came up with what sounded like a great idea to manage time: set a “theme” for each day of the week and do tasks related to that and only related to that. Once caught up with all the work that’s gotten out of hand, I figured, this strategy would help control the sense of being utterly scattered and allow me to take control of the mounting flood of labor that is overwhelming my life.
Well.
What it does is demonstrate, loud and clear, why I’m falling behind in all the various survival and income-earning tasks: I simply have too much work for any one person to do in a reasonable pattern of waking hours.
Yesterday was to be a “teaching” day. I’d already spent half of Sunday grading papers, that being a “choir” half-day and a “teaching” half-day.
Okay. Yesterday morning I started at 4:30, and I worked all the way through until 9:00 p.m., with one (count it, 1) break for a 40-minute walk around the neighborhood. Food was leftovers, so consuming breakfast and dinner (no time for lunch) took no more than about 30 minutes. The only reason I stopped at 9:00 was the online grading system went down, blocking me from entering grades. At that point I realized I was so exhausted I couldn’t do anything more.
That was 15 hours of grading papers, standing in front of a classroom, fending off e-mailed queries and demands from students, and wrestling with computerized classroom management software. Add the number of hours I spent on Sunday, about 8 hours, and you have 23 hours. And I still have two more rafts of papers to grade and a three-hour class to meet on Friday!
Probably I’ll need to put in at least two more teaching days to handle the remaining work…and, you know…there are only six more days left in the week. Note that we’re counting Saturday and Sunday as “work week” days. The current Copyeditor’s Desk client thinks I’m going to rewrite his CV for him forthwith; page proofs were supposed to have arrived yesterday for one of our GDU client journals, and those have to be turned around instantly; and I haven’t even picked up the page proofs for the novel I’m supposed to be editing—those landed on my desk last week.
To keep up with the workload, I will have to work 15-hour days, seven days a week, non-frikking-stop!
No wonder my house goes uncleaned for two, three, four weeks in a row. And no wonder I feel crazy when I have to drop what I’m doing to fiddle with the pool equipment. There’s simply no time to get to ordinary daily household tasks.
I have no idea how I’m going to cope with this in the spring, when instead of teaching two three-hour class meetings each week, I will have six one-hour sessions and twoninety-minute sessions. That’s right. Yesterday the spring schedule came in: they’ve given me three sections, which is what I need to get by and for which I’m thankful (in a way). The Monday-Wednesday sections will span 5 hours and 45 minutes a day, from 8:30 a.m. to 2:15 p.m.—counting commute time—for a total of 11 1/2 hours a week. The Friday sections will consume another four hours (with commute time), from 9:30 to 11:30. Thus 15 1/2 hours of each week will be spent in the classroom alone. And I’m paid for slightly less than 20 hours of work a week.
By the time I walk out of a classroom, all I want to do is sit down. I certainly don’t want to jump into the morass of grading papers. To grade papers for one section—short ones, not the 2,500-word research papers required of the 102 sections—takes a good 8 hours. Assuming I wait until the day after papers are handed in, I’m looking at spending that entire day just reading, grading, and filing brain-bangers.
Next spring I’ll have three sections. So grading represents an additional 8 hours of work a week, bare minimum, if papers come in from just one section; 24 hours if all three sections turn in papers, as they do at the semester’s end. So: for 49% FTE pay, we’re proposing that I work 23.5 hours, bare minimum, or 39.5 hours in a week when all three classes are in full swing. That’s before the syllabus, assignments, and class schedules are written for these classes, large tasks I have to complete before the paid job starts.
What we’re looking at here, with three sections of freshman comp, is five full days of unrelenting work each week, and that’s before I get to freelance work, before I water the plants, before I clean the floors and dust the furniture and scrub the bathrooms and degrease the kitchen, before I clean the pool and repair the pool equipment. And before the usual unbelievably time-consuming crises, exceptions, and wackinesses associated with teaching take place.
Yesterday’s 15-hour day of brain-numbing work was not this week’s first such marathon. By 4:30 yesterday morning (when I awoke wondering how the hell I’m going to get by financially next year and how on earth I’m going to handle the workload), I had barely recovered from a similar 15-hour day of editing a psychologist’s reports, articles, and C.V.
I fail to see how these “theme days” are going to work next spring, when four of every seven days will be largely occupied with standing in front of a classroom. That will leave three days and scraps, of which half of one day and one full evening are already committed, in which to do as much as 24 hours of grading, an unknown number of hours of editorial work, plus all the shopping, housework, yard work, car care, dog care, and everything-else care. Forget having a social life: there just won’t be time for idling.
{sigh} Pretty clearly, I’ll have to drop choir again. Damn it. I love singing…it’s the only break in the drudgery I get. But I guess I won’t have time for that, either.
And I’ll have to dumb down the classes even more than they’re already dumbed-down, which is majorly dumbed. The only way to survive this will be to cut incoming papers to a bare minimum. Even now, I’ve succumbed to the “rubric” technique, in which you lay out a set of low-level standards you’re looking for and simply ignore every other error and f**k-up the students commit. Thus a C paper can easily earn a B or even an A, because you simply don’t have time to sift through, mark, and explain every single illiteracy in every single paper. It helps you to get through the stuff a little faster, but the result is less than satisfactory. IMHO. To coin a sentence fragment…
At any rate, this little experiment reveals why I feel like I can’t keep up with my life. I feel that way because it’s objectively true: I can’t keep up with my life.
Its inclusion in the article adds significantly to the article because it shows the subject of this article and how the image depicted is familiar to the general public.
The image is readily available on the internet.
Image is of low resolution and would be unlikely to impact sales of prints or be usable as a desktop backdrop
So the li’l community college students have handed in their first batch of final, final, FINAL most-brilliant-thing-they-ever wrote essays. A few are surprisingly good. Most are unsurprisingly adequate, and a few evince some real challenges with language. Mercifully, so far none of them is flunking (exactly), and I’ve only got about four or five more papers to read.
Teaching students about writing has its challenging moments in an institutional world controlled by educators who are convinced that learning how language actually works does nothing to help students develop strong writing skills. Having made a living as a writer and, later, as an editor, I can testify from personal experience to the wrong-headedness of that idea. Most of my writing style has evolved specifically because I learned a lot about grammar and language in grade school, middle school, and high school. Over the years, I consciously applied knowledge of grammar and sentence structure to my own writing by way of developing a specific style, one designed to be moderately complex but not ornate. Though in my old age I often drop a letter or a word as my fingers fly over the keyboard, I rarely make a grammatical or structural error that is not a typo.
I believe that students are well served by a strong grasp of their native language’s grammar and style. But that’s something few of them learn.
After the chair of my old department at the West campus proposed and got approval for a course titled “Grammar and Style for Writers and Teachers,” the dean of the College of Education paid her a visit and said to her, “I wish you would not teach grammar to education majors.”
No joke.
So what you have, all you taxpayers out there, are teachers of English who do not know how to describe the workings of the English language. They do not know its conventions, they do not know where its conventions came from, and they have no idea how to teach your children how to form a sentence at once technically correct and graceful.
Inside the classroom, it means that you (the instructor) have no vocabulary to use in speaking with the students about issues they need to understand. There’s no way to speak easily and meaningfully with them about language and grammar (of any sort: traditional, structural, transformational, whatEVER)…because they don’t know the words to describe these things. Neither, we might add, did their previous teachers, being graduates of colleges that quite deliberately keep budding K-12 teachers in the dark.
So. Let us say I want to ask a class of bright young students to refrain from writing sentence fragments. I give them, as an example, this typical utterance:
Which is the main drawback to teenage drinking.
How do I explain that this is not a complete sentence? I’m speaking to people who may not know what a subject and a verb are, but more to the point in this case, I can’t easily explain to them that this is a fragment because it is a subordinate clause, and that we know it’s a subordinate clause because it begins with a relative pronoun.
When I asked my students why this utterance is a sentence fragment, one of them said, “Because it starts with a preposition.”
Understand: quite a few of them have been told they must never start a sentence with a preposition, but none of them seem to know what a preposition is. One reported that she had been told never to start a sentence with because, because it’s a preposition.
Because it starts with a preposition.
Because it starts with a preposition, my teacher said it is an incorrect sentence.
How do I tell them which of these is a sentence fragment and why? How do I tell them what patterns to look for when they don’t know what a preposition is, they don’t know what a subordinating conjunction is, they don’t know what a relative pronoun (or any kind of pronoun) is, they don’t know what an independent clause is, and they don’t know what a dependent clause is?
And, without using the terms “relative pronoun,” “interrogative pronoun,” and “adjective,” how do I explain which of these is a sentence fragment, and why?
Which is what I was trying to say.
Which of the puppies has the nicest personality?
Which way do we go to find the train station?
The current theory has it that somehow humans are born hard-wired with the grammatical structure of their native language, and so you don’t need to instruct them in it. That accepted as a given, obviously neither you nor your students need a vocabulary with which to discuss these matters. Instead, we’re told that the way to teach students to write is to make them write. And write. And write. The more they write, the accepted wisdom goes, the better they write.
Well, no.
The more you write badly, the more bad copy you churn out. When you don’t understand what you’re doing, all you can do is grope around in the dark. You have no way to improve your skill because you have no tools, no knowledge with which to improve. And no, grammar is not hard-wired into the human brain. It is learned in infancy by listening to the people around you. When the people around you speak a dialect—as, believe it or not, many Southwesterners do (oh, yes, Virginia: there is a cowboy dialect!)—you learn the grammar of that dialect. If you grew up in darkest Arizona, for example, something like I never saw them two mountain lions until they were right on top of me rings true. That is your hard-wired grammar.
And if no one ever teaches you how to speak about language, you’re unlikely to learn how to express that statement in lingo appropriate to the college or the white-collar office job.
What it means for a college writing instructor is that we’re left empty-handed of any tools with which to teach our subject matter. We are effectively hamstrung. There’s no way you can help students develop their writing skills without some common language you can use to discuss those skills!
To coin a Southwesternism: it’s the stupidest damnfool thing I ever heard.
Here’s something that just came in from a student I taught a couple of years ago when I was doing a little “noonlighting” at the Great Desert University’s West campus—thought you might all get a smile from it.
I used to say that journalism is more immediately rewarding than teaching because you very quickly have something in your hand about which you can say “I did that!” It can take many years to see what effect, if any, you might have had on a student.
The project the student describes is a proposal. Classmates were asked to write a real-world proposal for a real, doable project, addressed to a living human being or group (not their instructor!) in a position to make it happen, and to argue convincingly why and how it can be done.
Every now and then we make a small difference in the world, eh?
—–Original Message—–
From: Stephanie Estudiante [mailto:hermail@gdu.edu]
Sent: Sun 9/20/2009 8:32 PM
To: Funny about Money
Subject: Proposal
Professor—
I was in your ENG301 class a few semesters ago. I thoroughly enjoyed your class and still work constantly to hone my writing skills. Just a couple of days ago I received a letter that the proposal we wrote (as a project in your class) was a success, and Discount Tire Co. made a very nice donation to the Foundation for Blind Children. While it certainly took some time to move through the system, I was very pleased with the result. I felt especially happy for the Foundation, as I know its needs are great. But I was also quite proud that my work produced a really worthwhile result. So, if ever a student questions whether the skills being taught in your class will be useful in the real world—I would say resoundingly—YES. I just wanted to let you know.
Thanks for a great class!
Stephanie Estudiante
The Foundation for Blind Children’s home page is here.
Would you like to congratulate Discount Tire for this excellent moment of corporate philanthropy? Write to them here:
Discount Tire
Corporate Headquarters
20225 N Scottsdale Rd.
Scottsdale, AZ 85255-6456
So now I’ve met my first class at Paradise Valley Community College. I haven’t read their diagnostic writing yet, but on the face of it I can’t see the students are much different from the ones at GDU West. A few are a little younger: in Arizona high-school kids can take community college courses, and so ambitious university-bound young people will get the widely hated freshman comp requirement out of the way in their senior year at the lower tuition rate.
If a few are probably not university material, they appear to have redeeming qualities. Some are older returning students, retooling for new jobs after having been laid off. The latter—older students—are always the best to have.
Yesterday I applied for the full-time position that came up at one of the colleges relatively close to my home, a day late and many dollars short. Probably won’t get it, but a friend at Paradise Valley says an opening may come up there. That would be a highly desirable place to work, and the commute would be easier because it’s a straight shot up the freeway, not ten or twelve miles across crowded, hectic surface streets.
This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to get a real job with the district. Back when things were beginning to get truly grim fin the morale department for everyone at GDU, I applied for several openings at colleges where the drive didn’t seem too awful (some of the schools are in far-flung suburbs). As you can imagine, everybody and her little sister wants one of those jobs. A friend at Phoenix College told me her hiring committee got some 300 applications for a position I applied for there. Because these jobs are exceptionally well paid, for teaching—especially in the minds of liberal arts graduates, who perceive their prospects as dismal—the colleges often see applicants with Ivy-League degrees. This stiff competition is complicated by the politics of race: one job I tried to get was withdrawn when a faction on the hiring committee held out for a minority hire, and, because the job was not advertised as a targeted hire, the rest of the committee wouldn’t go along with it.
The closest I came to success with that endeavor occurred when a college that really was beyond reasonable driving distance called at the tag end of a semester and asked me to appear the following day prepared to deliver a PowerPoint presentation on a subject of their choice. The university had a strict deadline for when you could file your grades, and I still had fifty or a hundred papers to read and semester grades to assess, justify, confirm, and post. The deadline was the same day as the proposed PP pitch. I suggested they let me give a presentation on a composition-related subject that I had in the can; they wouldn’t accept that.
Weighing the probability that I wouldn’t get the job vs. the certainty that filing grades late would result in a black blot on my personnel file, I declined the privilege. Just as well: I hate driving around the Valley, and getting to that school would have entailed an endless drive over a freeway that seems to jam up every day.
After those two episodes, I got discouraged—one might say “sank into the morass of depression that afflicted all of my colleagues”—and stopped applying.
Obviously, given the possibility of earning $20,000 or $30,000 a year more for the same amount and kind of work I was doing at our supposedly more august university, I should’ve kept trying!
The district has three colleges within reasonable driving distance of home. I’m going to start applying for every single full-time opening that comes up in those three venues. Because of the recession, there won’t be many. But thankfully, Obama recognizes the importance of community colleges, and so some funding is being directed thataway. That a single full-time position came up at all is a good sign. There’ll be quite a backlog of people applying, and because many will be adjunct faculty already working there, I don’t have a snowball’s chance. But…
