My student evaluations from last spring were just returned to my box. They were a mixed bag–one class went well and the evaluations reflected this. Another class had some rocky moments, and that was reflected in the evaluations as well. Several colleagues (both of whom have been teaching for some time) take the evaluations too much to heart. Instead of seeing them for what they are–an instrument–they feel that they reflect their worth as a person.
I used to fret about these evaluations, too, but I’ve since realized that to worry is really to waste time. Now, when I get back the evaluations, I follow a process:
- I read all the comments from a class and sort them into categories: useful and useless. Normally there are quite a few useful comments in a class of 20-30 students. All the useless ones (He’s so mean, I don’t like tests, and so on) I ignore. I refuse to lose time fretting about them.
- I then turn to the useful pile and decide what is reasonable. This semester, for instance, several students said that they wanted more (?!) quizzes on the poetry unit because it helps them to gauge how well they are learning the material. Also, several noted that the course was back-loaded ( they had a lot more work toward the end of the semester) and wondered if some things could be moved from the last few weeks to other places in the semester.
- After finding the reasonable comments, especially ones that get repeated several times, I decide what changes I’ll make in the course and then immediately go to the syllabus and either make those changes or note them promintently so that I can consider them again next time I teach the course.
- I then record the numerical scores for every course in the master list I keep in my tenure/promotion spreadsheet.
- File the evaluations away for possible future use.
The process helps to take the emotion and worry out of reading the evaluations and losing time. All told, I spend about 15 minutes / class, derive some benefit from the process, and don’t waste my time.
What do you eat for lunch? Where do you eat?
Lately, I’ve been just having something at my desk while grading papers, but I’ve started to rethink lunchtime. First, it’s probably not healthy to “multi-task” a meal and something else. Then, of course, it’s sloppy. I always end up getting something smeared on a paper.
Along with my new parking resolution, I’m now resolving to take a break at lunch. I’ll pack something good, then either get out of the office and sit in the sun (a rare treat in northeastern Ohio), or just eat and enjoy my meal and get a mini recharge on my batteries.
One of my favorite Cather books is The Professor’s House. Professor St. Peter is an excellent teacher and prize-winning scholar. At one point, the narrator observes:
“On that perilous journey down through the human house he might lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper. So when the lamp was empty–and that usually occurred when he was in the middle of a most important passage–he jammed an eyeshade on his forehead and worked by the glare of that tormenting pear-shaped bulb, sticking out of the wall on a short curved neck just about four feet above his table. It was hard on eyes even as good as his. But once at his desk, he didn’t dare quit it. He had found that you can train the mind to be active at a fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be hungry at certain hours of the day.”
www.cartoonbank.com
For me, exercise and writing are a lot alike. I don’t enjoy these activities while I’m doing them, but I always feel better when I have done them. Just as with writing, I suppose I have to allocate time for exercise, not find it. I really don’t like to exercise. It’s not that I don’t know it’s not important. It’s not that I think that I’m too busy to do it. I just don’t like it. And now my waistline is starting to show it!
My new plan (I’m a big plan man) will help solve both my weight and parking woes: I’m going to park at an outer lot when I come to the university and walk to my office. If I park on the south side of campus, which is easier for me to access from home and has more parking spots available, I’ll end up walking about a mile uphill to my office, then a mile back to my car when I’m done. Allocating those small amounts of time (about 15 extra minutes each way), may make the exercise less of a bother for me.
www.cartoonbank.com
If you haven’s seen Paul Silvia’s book How to Write a Lot, you should check it out. Silvia is a psychologist who studies emotion; he is also a productive scholar. His book is full of good advice on how to be more productive. To top it off, he has a great sense of humor. The book is a quick and useful read.
He writes:
“You must ruthlessly defend your writing time. Remember, you’re allocating time to write, not finding time to write. You decided that this is your time to write… Be forewarned that other people will not respect your commitment to your writing time… They’ll resent your inflexibility, call you rigid, and think that there’s some deeper reason why you won’t meet with them… How can you handle well-intentioned intruders? Just say no–that phrase might not keep you drug free, Nancy Reagan to the contrary, but it works for protecting your writing time.” (15-16)
Perfection is highly overrated. I’ve never been called an overachiever or a workaholic, and in my book, that’s okay. I think G.K. Chesteron said (and he said a lot of things, so he probably said this or something close to it), “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing not well.” Sometimes perfectionism is really just procrastination dressed up in respectable clothes.
This is true in all aspects of the academic life. Sometimes you just have to let go of an essay and see what happens. Sometimes you don’t need to read or read the minutes from that last committee meeting. Sometimes you don’t need to plan a class down to the last second of the hour. A large part of good time management is deciding how much is enough.
Planning for teaching is a great example. When I first started teaching as an assistant professor, I dedicated hours and hours to preparing a one hour lecture/discussion class. For the three hours I taught that course per week, I spent about ten or twelve hours preparing. It was very frustrating since I would either rush through material just to fit in everything I had planned, or I would leave out things and feel that I had failed since I didn’t get to everything. When I complained about my problem one day at the café, a colleague from another department said, “Listen, you’re doing too much. Overpreparing is worse than underpreparing. Don’t spend more than an hour preparing for an hour-long class.” I followed her advice, and it was very liberating for both me and my students. My teaching improved dramatically–students even commented on it on the course evaluations. I kept forgetting that I was the expert, I knew this stuff, and as long as I had a basic structure to follow and had thought about techniques to convey the information, I didn’t have to try to “cram it all in.”
“The most unrealistic writing schedule is none at all. Don’t believe that somehow, miraculously, your article will get written in the next couple of months simply because you need it to be submitted.”
Wendy Laura Belcher. Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks.
If you haven’t done it yet, stop reading this blog and make out a writing schedule! When can you allot time to writing? The time is there, you don’t need to find it, you just need to decide how you’re going to use it.
Never get into a pissing match (excuse that phrase, but it is what it is) via email, either in academia or out. It’s a big time waster and never really resolves anything. This is a lesson I learned the hard way this semester. I spent hours writing and editing a series of emails that did nothing except cause hard feelings; several colleagues wasted as much time as I did, too. In spite of the pithy comments I made (there were some real zingers in them), I regretted the whole exchange after things had settled down.
Arguing (or debate) is best done in person because it is more effective. You can change tactics because of the give-and-take or even because of the other’s body language, or quite possibly because you realize you’re wrong. It’s much easier to see the brink of no-return getting closer and to veer off or stop completely before falling over into the abyss of bitterness and recriminations.
I now see how those hours (literally hours) spent crafting my emails were lost; I could have been doing a lot more productive things instead of giving vent to my spleen. Had I not emailed and just waited to talk, the matter would have been resolved in about twenty minutes. Vanitas vanitatum!
Here is a site (among many) devoted to email etiquette. Would that I had read it before sending my blistering e-missives.
This from the Cartoon Bank:
Not a good use of ANYONE’S time!
Office hours can be either a waste of time or a great opportunity, depending on how you approach the situation. Generally speaking, most universities expect you to have half the number of office hours as you have contact hours with students in a semester. So, if you’re teaching eight credit hours in a semester, you will have about 4 hours of scheduled time per week to meet with your students. (I always cheat a bit, though–I schedule an hour less than I should, but add “and by appt.” to my list of office hours.)
Generally, I don’t get a lot of traffic during these times, except around test dates and final exams. But you never know; I’ve had semesters when at least one or two students would stop by for almost all the posted hours. To make good use of this time, I try not to count on this time for an activity that requires uninterrupted time or a great deal of concentration. I’ve found this list of activities are great for office hours because I can start and stop them easily:
- Surf the web- I do a lot of web surfing during office hours, but try to keep focussed. Since I teach languages, I’ll often use this time on YouTube looking for authentic language clips that I can integrate into my class planning, either to show students in class or to have them view as homework.
- Website maintenance- We use a proprietary software for the web-based of our courses, so “maintenance” is probably overstating the case. But I do post things on my websites and tidy them up when I have this bit of time.
- Filing- I’m a pack rat, so there’s always something to be filed.
- Previewing textbooks- I’m always on the lookout for the next great thing in textbooks. Office hours is a great time to look through the ones that have arrived recently.
- Email- Catching up and filing away. I don’t write anything too involved, though.
- Making copies for classes- I get my weekly copying together for the next week and turn them in so that the student assistants can make the copies.
- Grade- I mentioned before that I like to have about 50-60 minutes to grade tests and essays, but I use office hours to grade either short quizzes or multiple choice of fill-in-the-blank portions of tests. If I get interrupted, it’s not had to get back into the rhythm of grading them.
