Syllabus Writing Brings Out the Worst

I think I’ve finally figured out that the worst part of syllabus construction isn’t even figuring out what to assign when, what to cut, what to keep — it’s that I turn into a weird design junky when I’m writing the final document. Do all the indents match? Is everything appropriately spaced? Would this be better in a table? With shaded rows? Is a hollow bullet point more appropriate?

The finishing touches take me forever and inevitably just lead to heartache the next day when I notice a new, awkward space on page 3. It cuts me more than the missing comma on page 2.

A bad habit: Using other teachers for feedback

I’ve realized a bad habit of mine. I often turn to my partner, also a college instructor, and say the following: “Does this make sense to you?” Inevitably, I then show him an assignment or a set of instructions, and usually, he says, “Yeah, that’s totally clear.”

The problem, of course, is that my classes are populated not by English-major professors but by just-starting college students. Things that click for me, or for C, do not automatically come across very clearly for my students.

One of the ways one of my departments has proposed to combat this trouble is to allow/encourage teachers to send their syllabi and assignments to another faculty member with some experience in “grade leveling.” The idea is that she’ll read your papers and tell you what “level” they’re written at. I like this idea, in a way, and I did send my papers off (though did not receive a response), but I also think it may, again, be a circular, insular process.

Far better, probably, would be to hand out syllabi and let students edit and reword them (without changing the content) until they make sense to them.

Oh. Hey. First day activity?

Late Work Rules

I’m reviewing and revising my syllabi for the next term (which begins Monday). This shouldn’t take much work, but it always does because I always end up tinkering with things. The policy I have in mind to change this term is my late work policy. For several years, my late work policy has been one of the most forgiving policies around. Basically, I accept late work — any late work — with no penalty if a student contacts me before the deadline (even the morning of) to request an extension. I take late work otherwise with a 10 percent penalty within a week of the deadline. I do this because I see three main reasons to penalize late work:

1. Late work inconveniences, mostly, the instructor. Since I’m always grading something, it’s not usually much of an inconvenience for me to receive a new paper at a later date. I also don’t really want to punish students for making me work harder, since there are sometimes stretches where they’re working very hard and I’m twiddling my thumbs.
2. Late work offers a student an unfair advantage (of time) over students who submit their work on time. Yes, it does — but this seems to even out in the fact that it puts students who turn in late work at a disadvantage on the next assignment they turn in, for which they’ll have less time. Also, because the late option is available to everyone, I don’t think it’s inherently unfair.
3. Late work demonstrates a student’s unwillingness or inability to prioritize or meet deadlines. Perhaps this is true, in some cases, but I have two problems with this. First, if a student can contact me in advance and admit that he/she can’t finish his/her assignment on time, that is a form of recognizing limits, and I want to reward that honesty. Second, I bristle at the idea that my job should include explicit instruction in time management, in part because it is so often expressed as a “desirable job trait,” and I do not work as a teacher to better prepare students for jobs. That is what on-the-job training is for.

I do, however, work as a teacher to help students succeed further in their academic career, and time management is a necessary skill for academic success. To this end, I’m not sure my policy is very effective, and I sometimes worry that students come out of my class feeling they’ve gotten away with something by turning in late work. This is usually not true. My one best reason for accepting work past the deadline is that my actual goal in every class is to encourage students to learn certain skills and make their best effort at every assignment. Often, for some students, an extension of a week can mean the difference between turning in a D paper that’s dashed off the night before and that neither of us really understands and a B paper that’s taken enough work that the student actually manages to imbibe some of what I’m trying to pass along.

Sometimes, of course, that week-long extension just leads to a student writing a paper in one night one week later than they would have. Are they getting away with something then? No: that paper still gets graded as it would have. (It is those papers, though, that make my quick dismissal of the inconvenience feel very thin). 

Anyway, this term, I’m probably moving to a one-late-paper pass system instead of the old way. This is mostly because I’ve seen too many students now sink too far behind once they’ve turned in a first late paper. I’m not terribly pleased with this policy, though. I’d welcome any other good ideas on how to deal with delays. 

How to Actually Save Students Money on Textbooks

So, if the previous post on textbook pricing discusses ways not to save students money, how can one actually do this?

1. OBVIOUS: Order cheaper books. It is astounding the number of professors who don’t know what their books cost students. It’s very easy to figure this out. Campus bookstores are pretty high-tech these days — check their prices online. Then, with the click of the mouse, you can easily find other texts with similar readings. Amazon is happy to provide you with a “People who bought this also bought that” list. Publishers list similar titles, too. Most departments keep libraries of textbooks that instructors use and have used. Oh, and there’s this thing called the library. More on it in a moment.
2. Get electronic desk copies instead of hard-cover desk copies of books you want to sample. This saves the publisher the cost of ink, paper, publishing, and mailing, and it’s a great way to sample a ton of books. Coursesmart.com, which I’ve mentioned before (I swear they don’t pay me), has a ton of texts on offer for browsing, long- and short-term.
3. Find books that the campus store can rent to students. Textbook rental is still kind of new, but it works much the way that car rental does: students pay a much lower rate for the book, promise to care for it, and return it at term’s end. Students in my classes have reported saving anywhere from $20 to $40 on their readers by renting — and this is a cost covered on student account funding at the bookstore.
4. Place your book on library reserve. The more copies that are available in the library, the more students will be able to actually use them. Give a reasonable reserve window — 2-3 hours — and figure at least 1 book per 20 people. Mention this option on the first day of class. Students who really don’t have the money for the book but are able to plan ahead can benefit.
5. Find out your library’s policy on electronic reserves — and offer them. Some libraries will allow for scanned material to be loaned out for an hour or two at a time. This is a great way to provide the textbook to students for little or no cost without breaking copyright.
6. Use OER. Open Education Resources are Creative Commons-licensed works made especially for educators and designed to replace textbooks. That means you can select them and include them in a course pack or just link to them from your course management system without worrying about legal ramifications.
7. Understand copyright. You can link to about nine articles per term under fair use — nine, and only nine. That’s nearly one a week for me.
8. Understand student printing costs. The beauty of online resources is that they’re free! The bad news is that students will still, often, have to print them out to bring them to class — and hardly any campuses still allow free printing. If your school charges $.05 a page for printing and you assign 20 pages of reading a week for 10 weeks, that’s $20. $.08 = 16. $.10 = $20. And so on until a book may be cheaper. (Plus binder cost!) Beyond this, printing is often an out-of-pocket expense for students, not something that can be charged to a student account. If there’s no money for books, there’s likely not money for printing, either.

Or, the shorter version: There’s a lot you can do to reduce costs. It all takes some effort, of course, and some practice, but it’s very likely someone down the hall is already doing these things. If we learn nothing else as teachers, surely, we should learn how to share what’s working.

Anyone else have good tips on reducing cost to students?

A note on timing and tumblr

If you’re seeing posts come up here during the day and going, “Hey, aren’t you supposed to be working?” well, yes! I am. And I am working. I queue posts to go up on Tumblr during the day, but I (usually) only write them after hours. (The exception to this might be a few photos or quick thoughts I toss out from my phone, uh, during my federally mandated fifteen-minute break times. Yup).

Also, WOOOHOOOOOOO weekend with no grading.

As you were.

AAUP 2010-211 Report on the Profession

Faculty members serving in contingent appointments, on the other hand, do not have the protections of academic freedom that come with tenure. They do not have institutional support for pursuing the scholarship that serves as continuing education for college and university professors and often do not have the freedom or the time to research controversial topics. Contingent faculty members find that renewal of their appointments depends more on their ability to please students than their ability to conduct rigorous classes that force students to think critically about the material they are learning. As sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa noted in their recent study, Academically Adrift, students’ cognitive performance is, on average, mediocre, and the major predictor of cognitive performance is rigorousness of instruction. We are not surprised by a lack of rigor in a system where 75 percent of the instructors are off the tenure track and therefore constantly worried about losing their jobs if they push their students too hard.

Notes

I have reached the passive-aggressive part of the term with my office mates.

AAUP 2010-11 Report on the Economic Status of the Profession

In all, graduate student employees and faculty members serving in contingent appointments now make up more than 75 percent of the total instructional staff. The most rapid growth has been among part-time faculty members, whose numbers swelled by more than 280 percent between 1975 and 2009.

 

What 5 o’clock Can Be Like

Today, I finished writing feedback on my first batch of first drafts from first-level college students. When those pieces are good, man, they are good (and the same is true of the converse).

I also taught a class, conferenced with a student, and got a head start on grading my first set of technical writing assignments. So the stack of a few days ago is now down to 12 papers to grade by Monday, though I will collect about 40 additional papers tomorrow (and 40 new quizzes).

But it’s 5 o’clock and my e-mail is closed, my bag is packed, and I’m not worrying about any of this until tomorrow. That’s a wonderful feeling. 

Some of the math behind the experiment, or, you make how much to do what?

This fall, I’m teaching six classes, or 20 credit hours, split between two institutions: Local CC, where I teach Developmental-level reading and writing, and Commuter-Rural CC, where I teach basic college-level English and Writing.

At Local, I have two classes of writing and one of reading (11 credits total) and roughly sixty students; at CRCC, I have a Composition I course (21 students), a Technical Writing course (25 students), and an online Intro to Literature course (30 students), for a total of 9 credit hours and 76 students there — and 136 students total.

This is the largest group of students I’ve ever had at one time, though I’ve come close before. If I spent one hour on every student over the course of the term — which would include grading all of his or her papers, all of our e-mail correspondence, and any by-appointment in-person time — I would spend almost 6 full days (no eating, no sleeping) doing nothing but working on or with students.

At both colleges, I’m considered a part-time adjunct instructor. At CRCC, the lowest paying of my two jobs, this means I have no benefits and share an office with five other instructors. If I spent one hour per student per class during our ten-week-plus-finals term, that would be 6.9 hours per week on CRCC student work; if I show up and teach both in-person classes, that adds an additional 5.5 hours per week. So that’s 12.4 hours a week for CRCC. Let’s add three hours a week for preparation time, and three hours a week for mandatory office hours (usually, prep time happens during office hours, but I usually need more than 3 hours a week of prep time). So, working 18.4 hours a week at CRCC, I would be making just at $20 an hour. Add in the hour-and-a-half round trip commute, and that benefits-free pay drops a bit more.

That figure works only if I spend less than half-time working on my classes and never need more than 7 hours a week to grade papers. Considering that, beginning in week three, I will have stacks of up to 50 papers at a time, that may be difficult (50 papers * 10 minutes per paper = 8+ hours).

Full-time instructors at CRCC in my department begin at a salary of around $45,000 (though many are paid much higher) and are expected to teach 5 classes per term. (They often teach fewer than this; I have no idea why, but I think there are deferments for committee work). Unlike adjuncts (and I am an exception this year), they have the option to develop online classes that they may then teach multiple times using the same setup, which means sometimes prep time can be lower. They are expected to hold office hours every day of the week (5 hours total) and participate in at least one committee. At 40-hour-a-week pay, they make roughly $34.50 an hour + benefits and, oh, job security.¹

To make that same amount at CRCC, I would need to work only 10.8 hours every week: since I’m standing in the classroom for 5.5 hours and required to hold 3 office hours, that leaves 1.5 hours of outside work in order to equal the same pay as a full-time staff member. That totals out to exactly 13 minutes per student per term. Or I could work more and make much less.

The trade off? I don’t have to go to the department meetings or be on campus every day — which is a good thing, since I have to teach somewhere else to survive.

^{1 This doesn’t even get into whether I think $34.50 is enough to pay a full-time teacher, whether I believe (I don’t) that full-time teachers only work 40 hours a week, or whether there’s a generous qualification gap between full-time faculty and part-time faculty (there is a gap, but in my department, it’s not expressible in education).}