CandidProf: Teaching by the numbrs
by Miki SaxonBy CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.
On my last post, I wrote about a student who was taking quite a bit of a colleague’s time. Today, I wanted to write more about that topic.
[Thus starts a multi-part discussion of what today’s teachers face and the choices that they make. Miki]
Some students simply require more instructional time than others.
Sometimes they have gaps in their background that you need to fill in. That means seeing you outside of class, since you can’t take up class time filling in gaps for everyone’s background.
Other students have difficulty mastering some topic in the class. These students take more time. In some cases, these students add significantly to my work load.
Unfortunately, the college administration likes to have bigger classes. They see it is as more cost effective to have one professor teaching in one large class what would otherwise require several faculty members to teach several sections of the class. They don’t see the extra work on the faculty. Administrators see you teaching the same number of hours, no matter how large the class, because they only look at the time spent lecturing and preparing for lectures.
They do recognize that three times the number of students would require three times the grading, but somehow that gets lost. And they almost totally ignore the fact that three times the number of students likely means three times the number of students requiring addition effort.
Eventually, those out-of-class meetings take on as much time and effort as teaching an extra section of the class. Of course, we don’t get paid for that. Plus, we are still expected to teach the other classes, serve on committees, do research, etc., so our total productivity goes down.
But promotions and tenure often are based on those non-teaching duties, so that means that faculty wind up spending less time on the students who need extra time. For some faculty members, that is just fine. But for me it is a problem.
I take my duties as an instructor seriously. But, I take my other duties seriously, too.
How would you handle the “extras?”
Your comments—priceless
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Image credit: fredjk CC license
