Coffee heat rising

Managing a large workload

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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.

Median income, median savings?

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Chug on over to Free Money Finance, where you’ll find an interesting article and discussion about some figures FMF has found, suggesting few Americans are ready for retirement. FMF is spinning off an article that dispenses advice on using your home equity to help finance retirement, but his attention is caught by some figures the authors refer to in passing. The passage he cites says this:

What’s more, the report noted the median value of financial assets is less than 1.5 times median income—$75,000— for the majority of middle-class households and that the median value of financial assets is just three times median income—$132,000—for the vast majority of affluent households. Read that report at this Web site.

The report indeed does suggest that most people have around 70 percent of their assets tied up in their homes.

Figures like these can’t tell us much until they’re correlated with age groups. It would help if we could know the median value of financial assets for people in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, their 50s, and their 60s. Then we could have a reliable feeling for how many 80-year-olds will be competing with how many 20-somethings to find jobs greeting shoppers at the local Walmart.

Since we can expect young workers to have little or no savings, and since many workers of all ages live in right-to-work states where wages are low, a combined disproportion of young earners and lower-income older workers would work to push the median down, unless there were an equal number of very high income workers. And nationwide, I’ll bet there’s not, despite the widely publicized conspicuous consumption.

Also, take a look at the wording in this thing. It’s hard to tell what is being said:

The median value of financial assets is less than 1.5 times median income—$75,000—for the majority of middle-class households and that the median value of financial assets is just three times median income—$132,000—for the vast majority of affluent households.

Is the median income $75,000, or is that the median value of financial assets? Is $132,000 the median value of financial assets, or the median income for most affluent households? Probably, one would assume, it’s the median income…but how does $132,000 qualify as “affluent” for a household income? That would amount to two $66,000 incomes. Now, $66,000 is a helluva lot better than the $28,000 gross I’ll be living on post-layoff, but it isn’t a lot. In the large scheme of things it’s really just an average income—I get by on that amount now only because my house is paid off, I have no other debt, and I live frugally.

When you get into the PDF at the Society of Actuaries website, you see that the researchers do break their data down by age group, gender, marital status, and  alleged socioeconomic class. But the subjects’ ages range from 45 to 74; “retirement” is defined as the point at which “a household’s primary focus switches from accumulating assets to using those assets to supplement its income so as to maintain a desired standard of living.”  In other words, if you kept working full-time and simply stopped contributing to your 401(k) or other savings instruments, you could be considered “retired.” This category applies only to those in the 55- to 74-year-old range. Median incomes shown in these figures are surprisingly low: for single women in the 55- to 65-year-old bracket, it’s $28,000 (men do better at $41,000), and for women between 65 and 74 it’s $18,000 (men’s median income drops to $28,000). In the “middle-class” range, net worth for younger marrieds, single women, and single men (respectively) is $348,000, $111,000, and $125,000; for the older set, net worth figures drop to $285,000 for married couples but rise to $130,000 for both single men and single women (7). The report finds that a large part of these Americans’ net worth is invested in “nonfinancial assets,” which include not just real estate equity but also equity in small businesses, vehicles, collectibles, and art (15).

Well. A small business can return a nice bit of income, and depending on how the corporation is structured, it may or may not show up on your income taxes as earned income. Much of the income from my S-corporation, for example, will be realized as dividends. And owning your house free and clear is worth more than the face value of the dollars involved.

The value of my home represents 57% of my net worth. Because the house is paid for, I would say that its real value to me is significantly higher: every dollar that I don’t have to pay to keep a roof over my head is a dollar I can use to buy groceries. My son’s monthly payment on a house of similar value is $1,420: almost an entire paycheck (net) of my soon-to-be-former $65,500 salary. If I had to pay a mortgage on my home, I could not survive on Social Security and part-time work.

While my savings eventually will supplement those two pittances enough to keep me more firmly in the middle class, as a practical matter I’m having to delay draw-downs for a year, in hopes that the economy will recover enough to allow my devastated investments to come back to normal. If I didn’t have a paid-off place to live, I couldn’t afford to do that.

Life’s a little more complicated than these figures seem to suggest at first glance.

So this is retirement?

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With retirement like this, who needs work?

I read student papers till 11:30 last night (the result of having loafed half the day before, if reading page proofs can be called loafing); leapt up at 6:00 a.m.; shot across the city with La Maya to an estate sale (nice stuff: too expensive); shot home, delivering edited page proofs to a publisher on the way; worked till class met; collected another mound of papers to add to the mound from the other class (yet to be read); shot back out to Scottsdale to a business reception; flew back; fed the dog; took the dog for a walk, wherein we witnessed the immediate aftermath of a three-fatality wreck (teenagers from the tenements across 19th Avenue); trudged home; sat down to write a few lines of copy I’d said I’d do on a volunteer basis for the choir director; listened to the clock tick while trying to figure out what to say (it ain’t easy to praise God when you’ve just seen the end of three kids); heard the Mac boing at the arrival of a new e-mail message bearing not one, not two, not three, but twelve new documents from a client…

Oh, God. At this rate, I’m not going to live through retirement!

Job interview?!?

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This afternoon a phone call came in: one of the westside community colleges.

Was I the person at this number who had applied for a full-time teaching job in the English department there?

Why, yes…

Was I still interested in the job?

Absolutely!

Seconds later, she had me signed up for an interview next Tuesday afternoon.

Well. That was a surprise. It’s been three months since I sent in that application. I figured never to hear from them. By now, I imagined, they must have hired whomever they had in mind when they started the search. Because the community college district’s application form requires you to enter the dates of your degrees and the inclusive dates of all your jobs, there’s no way you can hide your age from a search committee. They don’t have to see me to know I’m too old to restart a teaching career.

It’s so radically unlikely they’ll hire me that for a moment I was given pause: why jump through the interview hoops when what’s on the other side of the hoop is a brick wall? On the other hand: why not? Nothing ventured, nothing et-ceteraed.

Truth is, I’ve pretty much adjusted myself, mentally, to the idea of not working full-time. I wonder if I really want a full-time job.

On reflection, though: cobbling together a living with adjunct teaching, Social Security, blogging, and sporadic editing adds up to more than full-time work at very low pay. Just now I’m hardly doing any work for the Great Desert University but I’m putting in 12- to 15-hour days, every day: seven days a week. There’s not even time to clean the house. The only breaks I’m getting from the work are choir practice on Wednesday evening and senior choir performances on Sunday morning.

Today I made a conscious decision to loaf. I should’ve been reading student papers but just couldn’t face it. A day of idling meant…

• writing two blog posts
• contending with the daily onslaught of e-mail messages (about 70 on a slow day);
• downloading and unzipping two files from our India client, after Tina’s system wouldn’t break into them;
• inspecting and assessing them, then sending them along to her;
• cruising news sites and PF blogs in search of some inspiration for the next post;
• finishing a proposal for an online course at PVCC;
• chatting with a client editor over the phone;
• reading the rest of a detective novel’s page proofs, about 100 pages…

Oh, and repairing the toilet, after having made a run on the hardware store for parts.

It’s safe to estimate that a nine-month salary at one of Maricopa County’s colleges would start at about what I earn on a twelve-month contract at GDU. The amount I earn today, over twelve months, was about the average pay for community college faculty eight or ten years ago. On a nine-month basis.

A full-time teaching job in the community colleges would entail actual work, something I’ve learned to evade delegate in my present position. However, 15 hours a day of nonstop labor on various freelance and contract enterprises strikes me as something akin to work. And the pay works out to something less than minimum wage.

If I have to work that hard, I might as well be earning a decent living and, while we’re at it, getting a few benefits. Maybe I could afford to hire a plumber to fix the toilet.

Six steps to a frugal little Christmas

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Ah, yes. Costco has had its Christmas merchandise out since Labor Day, a sure sign that a white-plastic Christmas is y-cumin’ in. Some of us suffer from chronic skepticism about the annual merchandising frenzy. But you don’t have to be totally cheap to come up with a pretty Christmas celebration that won’t leave you feeling like Ebenezer Scrooge.

Here are a few strategies that have saved me some bucks:

1. Stop sending out Christmas cards. Just because someone sent you a card last Christmas doesn’t really mean you have to reciprocate. Add the cost of postage to the price of the cards themselves and this custom gets to be an expensive proposition. Send cards or Christmas letters only to your closest friends and family, and, whenever possible, hand-deliver them.

2. But when people send you cards, put them in an envelope and save them with your Christmas wrappings. Next year, take a pair of scissors, cut out the cute images, and use them to make gift tags. Simply take a piece of good-quality paper, cut it into a rectangle as wide and twice as long as needed to accommodate a cut-out Christmas card image, glue the image to one half of it, and fold the other half under. Voilà! A free and very pretty tag.

3. Make your own Christmas wrapping. Get some brown wrapping paper or white butcher’s paper and a set of stamps. (Or, if you’re really frugal, save and cut open paper shopping bags to lay them out flat.) Each time a gift is wrapped, stamp it with cute little designs, and then tie it up with pretty ribbon or colored rope. A variant on this, if you have children, is to roll out the paper and have the kids paint Christmas motifs on it. When the artwork is dry, roll it back up and you have bright, colorful, and meaningful wrapping paper.

4. Get a living Christmas tree. Planted in a good pot, a small pine will live several years—once I had one last four years. Cart it inside for the holidays, decorate it, and then take it back out when the celebrations are over. Water it well before bringing it in the house and again when you return it to its backyard habitat. If you have a place for a big tree in your yard, you can plant it in the ground after it outgrows its pot.

5. Shop in artist’s consignment stores for unique and interesting crafted gifts. Last year, I found an incredible pair of handblown, solid glass mugs for M’hijito, heavy manly things with swirls of royal purple running through them. The store had so many hand-crafted possibilities it was hard to make a decision, and most of them were reasonably priced.

6. Shop for Christmas gifts all year round…especially in the post-Christmas and midsummer sales. This lets you buy things you know are wanted without paying top dollar, and it frees you from the crazy-making Christmas rush. By spreading the cost over the entire year, it allows you to buy plenty of presents, but pay for them without running up a tab on the credit card.

While it’s true that Christmas is a part of the universally human gift economy tradition, by emphasizing fellowship more and piling junk on everyone around us less, we can keep the costs within reason and have memorable holidays every year.

Ads: Credit report monitoring scam

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A reader e-mailed to say he had come across an ad on Funny for one of those outfits that proposes to provide free credit reports from all three reporting agencies, but which hooks you in to a subscription whereby you end up paying a monthly fee for “credit rating monitoring.” Please be careful. Do not order “free” credit reports from any such lash-up: it’s a scam. While you do get the free credit reports—which you can get for yourself online very easily—paying someone to monitor your credit reports is unnecessary.

Here’s why: By law, each of the three credit reporting agencies, Experian, Equifax and Transunion, is required to give you a free credit report once a year. Because there are three agencies, you can monitor your own status, for free, simply by asking for a report from one of them every four months. If you then  review your bills and checking account statements each month, you will protect yourself just fine against identity theft. For free.

To get free credit reports without anyone trying to lure you into an expensive scam, go to AnnualCreditReport.com. This site was commissioned by the three credit reporting companies to provide the three annual credit reports mandated by law. You can request your report online, by phone, or by snail-mail.

You don’t have to ask for all three at once. So, if you order one in January, one in April, and one in August, you can cause the system to monitor your credit rating, allowing you to check for anything strange on a regular basis. It’s easy to put reminders in Outlook, iCal, or even Quicken to tell yourself when to call up a new report and which agency to ask.

Apparently different ads come up on different computers. I haven’t seen any such advertisement on my Mac; otherwise I’d get AdSense to block it.