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.
You have GOT to discuss this w/ people you work with. There are ways to cut down on the time w/out compromising your ethics.
Many people cut corners in ways that I find objectionable. So you need to find some kindred spirits.
I have had a several-year-long reprieve from freshman writing. I hope it will continue. Killer course.
@ frugal scholar: I’m not at all sure that limiting the amount of time you spend grading composition papers is cutting corners or compromising one’s ethics. At GDU’s West campus, the director of composition made us all attend her monthly seminars, in which she emphasized that we were to grade “holistically” (as she called it).
What she was describing was not actual “holistic grading.” But she is not the only one who has said this:
We were told we were first to skim each paper quickly, looking to see if the student appeared to have fulfilled the assignment. If the student had not fully addressed the assignment, we were to note this and say why. Then we were to read for such issues as organization, paragraph structure, and sentence structure.
She enjoined us NOT try to teach, comment upon, or grade for grammar, spelling, punctuation, or style. And she told us we should plan to spend no more than 20 minutes, max, on a given paper.
Given the workload we had — GDU courses are not capped at 25; they’re capped at 32, and unlike community college students, university students don’t drop courses readily — if we did spend more time than that on student papers, we would kill ourselves with overwork. I routinely worked 70-hour weeks. That was teaching 4 and 4; with the budget cuts, full-time adjuncts at GDU are now teaching 5 and 5.
Think of that: 32 x 5 160 students. A 750-word paper comes to about 3 pages: that’s 480 pages for ONE SHORT ASSIGNMENT! A 2,500-word term paper is about 10 pages long: 1600 words of drivel to read!!!
I submit that what is unethical here is not the instructor’s search for ways to handle this workload, but the custom of jamming way too many students into writing courses and the craven exploitation of adjunct faculty. When an institution treats people unethically, we can’t be surprised with the people return the favor.
Right now, I assess papers against rubrics hashed out in advance with the students. Each set of rubrics contains elements specific to the assignment. This is, in fact, a variant of holistic grading. See, for example, this brief guide. Here’s a way of applying it in group settings, and here’s a lead to an article describing its use with ESL students.
Well, many instructors here (5/5) grade portfolios only twice a semester. They take 2-3 minutes to look over the assignments and then put a grade on. That’s 6 minutes/student/semester for grading. Comments on papers are given during class time.
I’ve never tried this myself. And I’m not up on composition research.
@ frugal scholar: BARF! No wonder the late great Biker Bitch (former departmental chair, now blessedly emeritus) was trying to get us to shift to portfolios! That explains a lot…
Now, you see… I think that takes Creative Malingering too far. There’s a point at which Creative Malingering loses its artistic quality and turns into something like…like a three-year-old fingerpainting. No, no, no. This does not fly. The true artist knows that the creative malingerer must make it LOOK like hard work. Six minutes/student/semester a facsimile of work does not make.