OT (at least partially): Whining

I think I now finally have all of the student papers off my desk that were submitted to me. I shouldn’t get any more until finals. Two weeks. After that, the flood.

The general perception in the U.S. is that professors have it easy. This always frustrates me. We have a lot of freedom, but we also have a lot of responsibility. We have similar workloads to other highly educated professionals, as far as I can tell. I don’t have many fixed appointments where I have to be in a particular place at a particular time, but those fixed appointments are almost absolute, and I have to discipline myself to get the necessary work done even though I don’t have a supervisor. I was documenting my hours worked in the fall at the advice of my therapist and I was averaging 75 per week in October and November. So it’s perhaps not surprising that many of us take every opportunity we can at free moments not to be on the clock. For two weeks in December I did nothing because I was so tired that I spent entire days sleeping. Essentially in the U.S. many of us do a year of work in nine months. That’s what we signed up for, and I accept it and at times I love it but it is annoying to hear regularly from people outside the academy that professors are lazy. I am sure some of us are. And I am sure that is also true of some lawyers, doctors, politicians, parents, and factory workers.

As with any job there are things I like better and worse. I love the classroom, and I am very positive about research and writing in general (though I have had my share of problems with the latter). I am neutral with regard to administrative work, although positive if it is administration that relates to the creation of knowledge or the facilitation of education. The only thing I am really, really negative about is grading. I wish I could teach without having to grade. I honestly struggle with every grade I give, and with as many students as I have this semester, when every grade turns into an emotional struggle I spend weeks in agony over every assignment. When I start reading a paper that I know can’t get a score better than 70 I have to force myself to keep reading because I know that writing that number on the page is going to make my wrist ache. So I shuffle the worst papers to the bottom of the pile, and procrastinate, and it all ends in a compulsory all-day, all-night last minute debauch of grading that leaves me with a feeling worst than the most terrible alcohol hangover I ever had.

And yet good evaluation is a really important part of post-secondary education. Knowing how much to say, what to say, when to compliment, when just to note that you agree with the student or find something they wrote amusing or profound, knowing when to criticize and how much, knowing how to tell the student what to do in the revision or in the next assignment, getting all of this right is a chief way of really helping students learn, and thus a chief obligation of being a professor. So even if for some reason employers and other educational institutions decided they were no longer interested in evaluation, students would still need to have the experience. Students of mine have also told me that they find my way of giving feedback helpful.

So I have to find a way to keep doing it.

Though: what I really want to be doing lately, to the detriment of my responsibilities, is watching Mr. Armitage and writing about him and his various roles. It would be really interesting to watch him play a professor, I think. He looks great in glasses, which accentuate and spotlight the architectural qualities of his nose. This screencap from Between the Sheets represents how I felt this morning, after a twelve-hour nap after two solid days of grading.

Richard Armitage as Paul Andrews in Between the Sheets, episode 2. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery

~ by Servetus on April 22, 2010.