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 two ninety-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.
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I have had a reprieve from freshman writing for a while now, but I know that many people have found ways to grade faster and more efficiently. Unfortunately, some of these people are major slackers and find “pedagogical” support for doing nothing.
But some stuff I’ve seen–people who grade only in conference. That is, you read the paper and evaluate w/ the student there. What takes a lot of time is writing masses of comments–which most students don’t read or comprehend.
People also do portfolio grading. When they grade, they grade. ONLY. Comments are for earlier drafts.
You should talk to some of your colleagues about what they do. Grading papers for minimum wage is not honoring your life energy! Also, I used to feel that students spent less time writing the papers than I spent grading them….not the way it’s spozed to be.
Let me know what you figure out!
@ Frugal Scholar: All those things are exactly true.
I was astonished when I learned a work-avoidance scam I’d come up with as part of my Creative Malingering programme — having students write papers in groups, so instead of 30 papers to read you end up with five or six — is ACCEPTED PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE and, far from landing me in the dog house, earned me kudos!!! It went from something I tried to downplay to something I highlighted in the first paragraph of my annual review materials.
The community colleges, unfortunately, do not allow this. They specify exactly how many words each student is required to write over the course of a semester. This forces you to make every assignment an individual effort, saddling you with as many papers as you have students. The trade-off, however, is that course caps are much lower and, because of the high attrition rate, classes are far smaller than the university’s.
My sense is that putting a lot of comments in early drafts is an even greater waste of time than commenting on final drafts, because students slop any old garbage down on paper (or in little digital lights) so as to get through the requirement that they write a draft at all, which they see as an unnecessary imposition. I’ve been circling problems with a quick note cluing the writer to the problem (“paragraph coherency,” “sentence structure,” “sp”) and then telling them it’s their responsibility to figure it out and get it right. Truth to tell, about 80 percent of them (maybe 60 to 70 percent on the junior-college level) know each of these issues but just don’t bother to put together something acceptable in draft.
For the final draft, I’m developing sets of rubrics that I can score on a scale of 1 to 5. Twenty rubrics provide a potential total score of 100 points. This speeds assessment and creates a bogus appearance of objectivity.
And I’m absolutely certain that about 40 percent of students spend less time writing papers than the instructor spends reading and assessing their work.
Could this be why my house is an eternal mess that I can barely stay on top of it? Too much to be done and not enough time? Husband does dishes and washes his own clothes, but doesn’t notice much of anything else. Everyone makes messes, none of us disciplined enough to clean up after ourselves. The dining room table gets cleared off, and two days later it’s heaped to the brim with everyone’s stuff. Oh, and I have to say when I took my college courses at Rio Salado I would try so hard to be as perfect as I could. I remember taking one course… don’t remember what it was, but I remember that I didn’t do my very best and just turned in a half-a$$ed assignment, fearing the worst (a bad grade). I still got an A. It was an important lesson for me… a backwards lesson… in that I learned I no longer have to do my personal best… only, I don’t feel right doing a half-a$$ed job on anything. It is hard for me to lower my standards. But I do remember at times that I’m killing myself to do the best I can, when it’s not really necessary, because there’s always the chance that no one else cares. Too bad teachers have to be so overworked and underpaid for the job they are doing.
@ Mrs. A: Frustrating as the dickens, isn’t it?
The bodacious Mr. K has been sick in bed for the past couple of days. Asked for some time to do the past two assignments, I said, irritably overworked, it’s just a draft–turn in any old drivel and send it by e-mail. He couldn’t bring himself to do that and so threw himself around for five hours writing not one but two papers, leapt out of bed and flew to the campus to turn in a “draft” that would’ve done just fine for the final paper.
I find the culture of mediocrity especially frustrating when dealing with students who WANT to submit the best work they can. Because as an instructor you’re submerged in garbage — which as to be given as much attention as the best work, because after all the authors of the garbage are paying to be there, too — you have neither time nor energy to deal with the students who want to excel.