Protecting Time

What with the new year and new semester, there has been a lot of talk in the blogworld about schedules. People have been busy creating schedules and figuring how to keep research or writing time sacred. I came up with my own variation on a workable schedule and I've been trying to stick to it.

My schedule has me teaching Mon & Wed afternoons and Tuesday evenings. I've delegated Tues & Thurs mornings to research/writing (done mostly at home). I've delegated all day Fridays to research/writing & the occasional class prep (preferably at home). Wed mornings are meetings (service-related only).

This schedule gives me Mon morning and late afternoon and Tues, Wed & Thurs afternoons, to schedule other meetings (service/student/project-related) as well as prep, grade, and do various assorted tasks that pile up during the week. I think that's a reasonable amount of time to leave open. Of course they are not permanently open. They get filled as I get requests for meetings and if you want to be on my calendar I generally need a week or two's notice. Again, I think this is reasonable.

The difficulty comes when large groups need to coordinate their calendars for a meeting. In the past, when it would became apparent that the meeting could not take place within a week or two without someone caving, I would cave and give up my research/writing/at home time. The semester has been in swing for two weeks and I have not caved. What has happened instead? No meeting. I'm thinking this new approach is beneficial in more ways than one.

Off And Running

So the new semester has officially begun here in SCBT and we're off to an excellent start. My teaching schedule this semester is MW day and T night. This means that by the end of the day Wednesday (as in right now), I am done for the week. Wednesday is also meeting day and today was the first departmental meeting of the season. We meet as a department two times a month and the other weeks we have various committee meetings scheduled.

Today we tackled next year's teaching schedule. I'm curious how much input you all get in deciding on the courses you teach? Having never been in a teaching environment before it is all new to me. Last year what I figured out was that all decisions were made in private with the Department Head [DH] and there was a lot of "what do you want to teach?" as opposed to "here's what you will be teaching." While this is very nice it does make for shortages in some key courses. So today we tried to tackle it as a [somewhat large] group. All core courses, across all programs, were projected and we negotiated who should teach what. Keep in mind we always fall way short of covering our minimum number of courses - due to buy-out and administrative duties - but we were trying to get the core courses taught by full-time faculty and not farm it out to adjuncts.

I think we did a fairly decent job. Everyone behaved and took responsibility. Not everyone was happy but no one seemed particularly upset. We fell way short of meeting our need but there seems no way out of this other than raising the required number of courses taught for each faculty, which to some extent we did in a recent meeting when we decided that no one could buy out of teaching altogether. The discussion also brought up some critical issues that are occurring in one of the programs and I think it became evident that what happens in one program affects us all.

So, as it stands now, I will be teaching the same two master's level courses I've been teaching since I got there (and love) as well as picking up an additional undergraduate course (teaching one section in the Fall and another in the Spring) that is exactly in my area of expertise and research. It also looks like my schedule will allow me to go to the dojo two nights a week instead of one, so I'm a pretty happy camper.

I have much more to say on the start of my classes this term but that will need to wait for another post. The only bad news today is that my Ipod has just up and died.