I recently received an email from Katherine, an adjunct instructor who teaches three different business courses at a community college in Illinois. She writes: "I can't seem to get organized in finding time to have a life. How can I structure my courses so that my students are engaged and I don't have so much work to do? I am staying up until 3-4:00 a.m. and then getting up at 5:00 for an one-hour drive to the college."
This is an issue that I think we all struggle with. We get into teaching because we care about our students and want to do a good job of educating them. But as Katherine states, we can spend a lot of time preparing for classes and grading that doesn't always seem productive. My answer to her:
Hi Katherine,
It's hard to answer this without knowing what you are teaching. I try to schedule class activities that will be beneficial but not require as much grading. So in a class of 40 students, instead of doing individual papers, assign group projects/presentations to teams of 4-5 students. Put together a grade sheet that allows you to check off comments instead of writing all these on each paper. Give tests that are partially objective (for example, in HR Management classes when I am teaching about employment laws, I can give the students a scenario and then ask which law applies and they can answer this in M/C format). Assign homework and then randomly pick which problems you will grade. After giving back tests so students can see how they did, take these back up and keep them/use some of the questions again another semester.
How about you? How do you schedule your workload to satisfy your intrinsic motivation to be a good teacher and yet also have time to have a personal life?
I'd be curious how many times Katherine has taught these classes before. If it is her first time through the courses, new preps are the equivalent of slave labor. You just grit your teeth and muscle through the year/semester, learn from it, and decrease your prep time the second time you teach it. Also, what is her passion and comfort level behind each of her subjects. I taught a new class last semester on creativity in business that did not seem like work, even though I put in a ton of hours to prepare for it.... the passion was there, both for the topic and the students. Seems like there are a lot of factors in Katherine's situation that might guide the answer in different directions.
Posted by: Timothy | May 28, 2006 at 09:09 PM