Tuesday

On Tuesday I tracked from about 7 AM to about 4:15 PM.  I wasn’t very accurate with the tracking, so these are my best guesses for how I spent about 9 hours (8 if you don’t count commuting).

Commuting t/f SA: 1 hour

SA Admin: 1.5 hours

SA Grading: 1 hour 15 min (same as yesterday)

SA Prep: 2 hours (had to write a paper topic and plan)

SA Teaching: 2.5 hours

NLNRU Admin: 45 min by email and phone

No exercise, housework, NLNRU teaching or prep, writing, or writing biz stuff.  Tuesday evening was just a nice, ordinary, lazy evening.  We had baked potatoes for dinner, Stubb went to work, the Snork Maiden and I rented School of Rock and made cocoa and watched about half of the movie before bedtime.

On Wednesday I go back to the ENT, so my workday probably won’t really start before 10, though I might do a bit of grading in the morning before I go.

Trying again: Monday

Like last Monday, a long SA/NLNRU day.  I tracked 12 hours, 45 min, or about 11 hours 15 min without commuting.  Did not count lunch, breaks, walking around either campus, etc., and didn’t track some half-work, half-not conversation with Dr. Tea or a hasty pre-class boxed-sushi dinner with two of my NLNRU colleagues.  I left the house at 6:55 and walked back in about 15.5 hours later.

Commuting t/f SA: 27 min

Commuting t/f NLNRU: tracked 1 hr, but probably more like 1.5

SA Admin: 15 min

SA Grading: 1 hour 15 min (but should have done more!)

SA Prep: almost half an hour

SA Teaching: 1 hour 45 min

NLNRU Admin: 30 min

NLNRU Prep: 3.5 hours (probably some of this was more admin than prep, but included a hella long meeting with teaching team and commenting on last week’s assignments)

NLNRU Teaching: approx. 3 hrs.

Writing: 20 minutes (part of a plan to work in small chunks during the week so that it’s not such a cold start on the weekends)

No exercise, housework, or writing biz stuff. 

Again this week, Tuesday ought to be a lighter day in general, although it’s a busier teaching day at SA.  I need to get up early to grade a few remaining papers, but having decided that the other batch of papers is not getting done until Wednesday, I can decide to pace myself on it tomorrow.  I don’t teach this Wednesday morning, so I’ll grade most of the other batch then.

And since I only saw the Snork Maiden awake for about twenty minutes this morning, we’ll probably have a quiet at-home evening on Tuesday.  Stubb will be working, and the SM has a school project under way, but we might even watch a movie–or maybe just half of one.

Three uses of the knife

Dean Dad observes that last week’s New York Times article “Back to School, as an Adjunct” can be read as “refreshing, bizarre, or deeply offensive.” I was all ready to get offended, but I think I’m going to have to go with Dean Dad: it’s mostly bizarre.

Here’s the part that is not bizarre, but also not quite openly expressed: for some professionals, adjunct teaching might just possibly make sense as a way to broaden their skills and their networks in a time of economic uncertainty.  The article quotes a consultant who operates an outfit called Faculty Development Associates, which “helps colleges train teachers”–Google the name and have a look at the website; interesting that some colleges outsource this kind of professional development for adjuncts in the trenches.  Anyway, this fellow told the reporter that “part-time teaching can broaden one’s résumé and contacts…In professions like the law, he added, it can be an excellent way to find new clients.”

I assume that he means that your reputation will get around, and that former students might conceivably approach you later as potential clients, or recommend you to their friends in need of legal advice.  I certainly hope he doesn’t recommend passing out your business cards and brochures in class. 

Digression:  In the creative-writing biz, there are many teachers who troll for new private students by teaching otherwise poorly recompensed adult-ed classes.  I find this potentially a little icky; if I’m going to work with former students, I would really prefer to do it for free and in a way that has some natural limitation to it (i.e., I’ll read your manuscript and meet you for coffee to discuss it, but when we get up from coffee, we’re done, and if I’m too busy to do this, then we don’t do it; you don’t get to rent me.  Oh, and if I don’t like your work, or think I have anything to offer you, I’m too busy).  But I do know people who do it in a way that doesn’t seem objectively icky to me.

But say you’re a lawyer who’s hung out a shingle, and business is slow lately, and a new firm has moved in down the street (obviously I know nothing about the actual lives of lawyers).  Maybe you have a little teaching experience; let’s say you did an M.A. in history  before you went to law school.  And let’s say you have a neighbor who is the assistant registrar at the local community college, and she suggests that you might consider applying to teach one of the criminal procedure classes the CC offers for students who are preparing for careers in criminal justice.  The course uses a standard textbook, so you don’t have to guess what your students need to know, and the department has ten semesters’ worth of old syllabi on file, so you have something to guide you in terms of how much work you should assign.

Particularly if you already have a little bit of a taste for teaching, something many people do have, why wouldn’t you consider this?  You’d be out in the community, meeting people with whom you otherwise wouldn’t cross paths.  You’d pick up a little bit of cash while adding something interesting to your bio and developing a new bunch of skills.   

 This goes double and triple if you’re in a profession that’s actually endangered, such as journalism.  

But now we get into the bizarre part, which is that the article seems totally out of touch with the concept that, as DD points out, these jobs are real work.  The learning curve in teaching is steep; heck, before you even set foot in the classroom, you have to grasp about a thousand things about your campus, its culture, how things work there, why you can’t just say “Sure” when a student you’ve never seen before walks in the door and asks to add your class.  Having been a student is very faint preparation for teaching a roomful of them; in some ways, it’s almost counter-preparative (not a word, I think, but you know what I mean), because of all the misconceptions students have about what teachers do and why they do it the way they do.

The Times often publishes terrific articles about workplace issues: dealing with workplace bullies, communicating with people one level up or down, developing teamwork, learning the culture of a new office, and so on.  It’s bizarre that this article overlooks that adjuncts have to cope with all that sort of thing, starting from the very first step toward getting the job in the first place.  It’s like one of those teaching daydreams you have before you begin to teach, the one in which everything magically begins when you walk into the classroom on the first day of classes. 

Like I said, bizarre.

Experiment suspended for now

The best-laid plans, etc., etc.  Anyway, it’s really an ear infection, and I did get seen on Thursday but I do have to go see an ENT on Friday.  It was surprisingly difficult to get an appointment, but I finally got one.

I did meet all my classes; Dr. Tea took over the second half of the second one, giving me two and a half hours to go out to the doctor, get seen, get prescribed, visit two pharmacies, and get back.  The class afterwards wasn’t really a class, more of a study hall, because I was still in pain and felt I had been quite enough–maybe too much–of a hero for one day anyway. 

I don’t have classes this particular Friday morning (rotating schedule, remember, and a lighter load at SA), and Dr. Tea will take my homeroom, bless her, but I’m planning to come back for the afternoon.  And I still have a few administrative–again with the administrative!–responsibilities to discharge on Friday if at all possible. 

Really, it’s not that I can’t take a sick day.  Normally at SA I am more than happy to take one if I need it, or if the Snork Maiden is sick.  And if I think I’m contagious, I stay away.  It’s just that it’s almost twice the work afterwards than if I had just shown up to class, even not bringing my best game.  (My morning classes weren’t even half bad.)

Wednesday

actually looked quite a lot like Monday, but felt lighter because there was a little less teaching at SA (2 hours) and none at NLNRU.  I left SA at about 2 PM and went to NLNRU, where I took a brisk walk, read a few applications, nominated a student for an award (still some laudatory statements to write, but the process has begun), had conversations with my chair and the chief administrator, enjoyed dinner with a visiting writer, and attended the VW’s reading. 

Then I woke up in the middle of the night with what felt like an ear infection getting started off of a cold that began a week ago.  I got out of bed, took ibuprofen and Sudafed, applied pressure to the tender spot underneath the jaw that my friend the Violinist taught me about, and stayed upright, figuring that if the inflammation decreased, the ear might drain without turning into a full-blown infection.  Two hours later, it feels a lot better, only a tiny bit achy and quite a lot less congested, so now I’m unsure whether to call in sick and go to a doctor, or go on in to SA.  This is my longest teaching day (about four classroom hours), which means that it’s a fairly demanding day but also that it is pretty hard to miss. 

My last ear infection, a couple of years ago, was so painful that I could hardly stand it; it came on fast and I felt as though I was fighting the urge to actually run, as though I could run away from the pain.  Ibuprofen hardly blunted it, whereas now it’s more like I’m aware that my ear doesn’t feel quite right.  Since the doctor’s office is closer to SA than to home anyway, I’m thinking of going in to school and trying to get through my first two classes, which are double periods.  Then, if I have to leave at 11:30, I can ask someone to cover my last class, which is after lunch, or ask an administrator to go and give the students a free period or a study hall. 

Or is that ridiculous, and I should just go to the doctor?  So hard to tell with these things sometimes.  I’ll wait and watch until 6, I guess, and then I’ll decide.

Tuesday’s results

Indeed, a much more sensible day, in part because I only had one class, although throughout the day I was aware of being tired from the day before and didn’t feel I was working  as briskly as I can when I’m fresh.  I tracked 8 hours 18 minutes between 7 AM and about 4 PM, of which about 40 minutes was commuting, so about a 7.5-hour workday.  I figure the additional 40 minutes includes lunch and a period of about 20 minutes in the afternoon when I took a break and read blogs.

Commuting t/f SA: 39 minutes (I didn’t go all the way home when I left; I met Stubb, the Snork Maiden, and Dee at an ice rink.  The girls skated and then we all had dinner.)

Conference: 10 minutes (emails)

NLNRU Admin: 1 hour 7 min

SA Admin: a whopping 2 hours and 15 min!  Emails, meeting with the literary magazine editors, meeting with a job candidate, logistical conversations with department colleagues. 

SA Class Prep: 1 hour 23 min, including planning for the next unit

SA Teaching: 1 hour 5 min

SA Grading: 1.5 hours (I really thought I’d get more than this done, but I let prep and admin suck up more time than they should have)

Writing biz: about 10 minutes on a professional issue for a writer friend 

No commuting to or from NLNRU, NLNRU class prep or teaching, exercise, housework, or writing.

Monday’s results

Mondays are usually my intense days this semester because I teach in the evening at NLNRU, so this was a heavy day.  Tomorrow should look quite different.

Commuting t/f SA: 25 minutes from home to SA

Commuting t/f NLNRU: a total of 1.5 hours from SA to NLNRU (just under an hour) and NLNRU to home (just over half an hour; there’s not much traffic at 10 PM). 

Housework: 5 minutes in the morning before work paying a bill online.  (I washed a few dishes when I came home, but I think of dishes and laundry as just things one does, like taking showers and getting dressed.  They have to be done fairly steadily.  Paying bills counts in my mind as housework, though–even though obviously that has to be done fairly steadily too!)

NLNRU Admin: 1 hour 11 minutes

NLNRU Class Prep: 1 hour 13 minutes (includes commenting on student work, but does not include rereading the text, which I did over the weekend).

NLNRU Teaching: 2 hours 45 minutes.

SA Admin: almost 3 hours.  Unusual in that we had an hour-long faculty meeting after school (we typically have one a month or fewer, but we happen to have two scheduled this month).  I left for NLNRU later than usual, but traffic wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.  Also, another 45 minutes or so of this was spent at a schoolwide musical assembly, which didn’t seem to fall under the other categories, but was certainly not discretionary time.  The remaining hour-plus included things like answering emails, running an errand on campus, scheduling a room, putting attendance into the computer, etc.  (I did tend to bunch these things together so that I could track them more efficiently.)  Edit: I also spent about 20 minutes writing up the minutes for our departmental meeting last week.

SA Class Prep: 16 minutes.  (Also atypical; it was Monday and I had prepared for all three classes over the weekend.)

SA Teaching: almost 3 hours (three classes, including class change times and conversations after class).

SA Grading: 49 minutes (about 35 grammar quizzes).

Nothing on the conference, writing, the writing biz, or exercise.

In total, I tracked about 14 hours, of which 2 were commuting, from 6:55 AM to 10:25 PM (15.5 hours).  The other hour and a half includes breaks–I ate part of my lunch while meeting with a student, but I did spend 15-20 minutes in blissful untracked solitude, and I stopped the timer when I got up to make a cup of tea or use the bathroom, for example–and things like walking from the parking lot at NLNRU to my department while talking with my mom on the phone and stopping to get coffee.

I saw Stubb and the Snork Maiden for about half an hour in the morning, but obviously they were on their own for the afternoon and evening.  Stubb was still awake when I got home, but we crashed before too long. 

On to Day 2!

Time keeps on slippin’ into the future

I cracked myself up this evening at nephew Snufkin’s birthday dinner by saying “I see into…the future!” and when Stubb’s mom (who kindly humors everyone, no matter how cracked) said, “What do you see, dear?” I stared into my half-finished plate of chicken, shrimp, and rice and intoned, “I see…tomorrow’s lunch.“

So I mentioned I have this application on my phone, TimeTracker, that lets you track time spent on different projects, and I’ve been playing around with it for a few weeks.  You open it up and tap on the project you’re working on, and a timer runs until you tap it again or until you tap a different project.  I wasn’t exactly sure why I thought this would be a good app for me except that I am always aware of time and how I use it, and yet also aware that I’m probably not perceiving accurately where it all goes.  Since I don’t always have my phone with me during the school day–it mostly sits in my bag under my desk, and I teach in other classrooms and prep in the workroom while my classroom is in use–I haven’t always TimeTracked accurately, and there have been days when I didn’t even try.  However, the results I’ve gotten when I have done it have been interesting to me so far.

For one thing, although I feel as though I’m grading all the time, and in fact I do usually do at least some grading almost every day, the number of hours really varies a lot and doesn’t always match up with how much I think about grading.  After first-semester exams, yes, I did grade a lot.  I estimate (because I didn’t log them all) that it took about 18 hours to grade 60 exams, calculate final grades, double-check everything, write comments for struggling students, and finish putting the semester to bed.  The first week of the new semester, of course, I didn’t grade much–except that I did give, grade, and record 60 reading quizzes, about 2 hours worth of grading. 

One surprise so far has been that administrative “trivia” at SA consumes a nontrivial amount of time.  Another is that I spend more time than I thought on a typical day on administrative matters at NLNRU.  Even fielding a handful of emails can take up an hour or more of the day, and would take more if I let it.  Using TimeTracker actually helps here, because it encourages me to stick with one batch of work until I’m ready to move on to another, so I don’t even deal with NLNRU emails if I’m reporting working on something for SA. 

Another surprise is that, based on the few days I’ve managed to track, I think I may actually not be working much more than 40 hours a week.  I do have the sense that there is always something else to do–but I seem to balance out the crazy long days with days that are more reasonable, when I’m home by 4:15 and I don’t do any work all evening. 

Whether or not I count commuting must matter, though, because I spend a heck of a lot of time in the car.  And it might be that it really doesn’t make sense to go physically to NLNRU more than twice a week, because of the sharp increase in time spent commuting when I do.  

 Anyway, I thought that this week, I would attempt to TimeTrack all hours spent going to, coming from, or at work.  The categories I’ve set up in TimeTracker are:

Commuting t/f SA

Commuting t/f NLNRU

Exercise

Housework

(those two are there because I am curious to see real data for those)

Conference (a commitment unrelated to SA or NLNRU)

NLNRU Admin

NLNRU Class Prep

NLNRU Teaching

SA Admin

SA Class Prep

SA Teaching

SA Grading

Writing

Writing biz

Now, I should say up front that I doubt I will do much writing during this, a typical work week.  I might get in a couple of hours on the weekend.  I’ll probably spend less than two hours on the conference, less than three hours on exercise, and less than two hours on housework.  The big time expenditures Monday-Friday will be NLNRU- and SA-related.  If this bores the heck out of you, feel free to tune out; otherwise, join me and find out how I really spend my time!

(P.S.  Recovering control freak?)

The art of racing in the rain

Seems to me that the older I get, the more I recognize that sometimes I just don’t have to deal with things with which, when I was younger, it would have seemed absolutely incumbent upon me to deal:

1. I don’t have to accept invitations to social events that I don’t want to attend just because there is no apparent reason I can’t go. 
2. This is true even if there might be some non-recreational reason to go, such as professional networking.  (Of course, there are still things I feel a responsibility to attend.)
3. I don’t have to argue with people just because I happen not to share their points of view.
4. I certainly don’t have to try to correct people’s every misunderstanding.
5. I don’t have to correct every mistake on a student paper, and in fact there are often sharply diminishing returns to doing so.
6. I don’t have to try to fix every problem of which I become aware.
7. If the “problem” falls directly into someone else’s area of responsibility, there are times when it’s good to let that person know of the problem, times when it’s appropriate to offer to help fix that problem, and times when the best response is to turn a blind eye to the problem altogether.
8. People sometimes bring me problems, thinking (or fooling me into thinking) that they want advice or help, but what they really want is someone to listen, and if they don’t recognize that at first, sometimes I can.

I suppose that what all this adds up to is that I am a recovering control freak?

In brief

The meeting went fine, basically, although it did cause me to marvel at how long it’s been since I sat in a meeting quite like that.  We were indeed asked to give a short description of our projects, and I was one of the few who managed to adhere to the short part.  In particular, a professor of French and a professor of history went on and on and on until it became an object of fascination to me to see how long they could possibly continue giving a brief description of a proposed event. 

Then I was patronized by a major gender theorist.  Good times.  (I don’t think this person meant to be patronizing, but it sure sounded that way.  I broke out the nodding and the smiling, figuring that if others in the room who thought I was being condescended to, at least they would notice I have the capacity to be gracious about it.)

Then a meeting that was scheduled for Thursday in my own department got rescheduled, which was kind of a relief and spared me a trip to NLNRU.

We’re going to nominate one of our grad students for a university-wide award, the sort of thing that this program, under its previous leadership (and before I was hired), never used to do.  It was a tiny fiefdom, run by a megalomaniac–okay, I may be a little biased here.  Anyway, we were not so much with the participation in university-wide initiatives.  Obviously, I think it’s better this way, but I do notice that it’s more work.