Though Fortune's malice overthrow my state,
My mind exceeds the compass of her wheel.
William Shakespeare
I haven’t posted much lately because I’m on the hamster wheel. What’s the hamster wheel? Now that school has been in session for a few weeks, grading has been added to the mix of teaching and class prep. Not to mention some other stuff I’ll get into in a minute. But my life basically looks like this now:
Sunday: Grading. Prep for Monday morning class.
Monday: Teach. Prep for Monday afternoon class. Teach. Prep for Tuesday morning class.
Tuesday: Teach. Grading. Prep for Wednesday morning class.
Wednesday: Teach. Prep for the afternoon class. Teach. Prep for Thursday morning class.
Thursday: Teach. Grading.
Friday: Faculty meetings. Course material creation.
Saturday: Rest, hopefully.
If anything gets slightly off, I’m fucked. For example, I went out on Saturday night and had one too many potent cocktails at my local, The Alleghany Wine Mixer. I was hungover on Sunday, so couldn’t do as much as I usually do, so everything got backed up for the entire week. It became a scramble. I ran really hard on the hamster wheel that week.
As I mentioned in the past, grading is the bane of a professor’s life. It’s hopelessly time-consuming. Even with TA help and having set up rubrics (aka guidelines for how we grade) in Canvas (our teaching tool), it takes from 20-30 minutes per student to grade an assignment. I have 70+40+30=140 students this semester. Now, we split grading with our co-instructors (thank god), but that’s 70 students to grade. Or 30-35 hours of grading. Nearly every week. It’s constantly hanging over my head like my own homework to do.
What’s gotten lost in the shuffle as I run on the wheel is the book I’m working on, which is the most impactful thing I should be doing. According to my boss. I’m also teaching a new course this semester (Interaction Design Fundamentals), that I have to put course material together for the second half of the class. And I’m helping create a new course for Spring Semester (Advanced Interaction Design) that I should be helping shape. All of this is suffering under my course load.
On top of this, it’s the start of conference season, and as Professor of The Practice, I need to be out there giving and listening to talks. I have my first one coming up, with a second one and a workshop right on its heels. So on top of everything else, I’m preparing talks.
Thankfully, a shift in department policy seems to be happening that will ease my load. Teaching Faculty and Special Faculty (me) will only teach two courses instead of three in Spring. This is a huge difference. I’ve pointed out the math before and it’s roughly 15-20 hours a week per class. So two classes mean a 30-40 hour work week, as opposed to my current 45-60 hour work week. This semester I’m working more than I did in tech…for $100k less salary. (Although don’t get me wrong: I’m extremely grateful for this job! A lot of my contemporaries have been out of work during this long tech winter. I was facing the prospect of literally moving back in with my parents. This is an amazing opportunity, and one I don’t take for granted.)
I’ll be teaching Advanced Interaction Design and Designing AI Products and Services next semester. But for now, I’m on the wheel.