[Englecturers] workload committee meetings

Mon Jun 13 21:00:22 PDT 2005

Dear Stephanie,

I agree with what others have already said.  I think that giving the
committee chair 69 essays to grade is an excellent idea.  I'm embarrassed to
admit that even after all of these years teaching, I still need at least a
half hour to grade each essay.  When I hand essays back, I have students
correct errors and show how they would reorganize thoughts or clarify points
in pen on their essays because after all the work I put into grading, I want
them to learn something from my comments.  Frequently after these classes I
end up putting in many more unofficial office hours explaining concepts to
students who couldn't understand or correct their writing problems during
class.  Like everyone else, I also end up putting in many extra office hours
shortly before essays are due because students suddenly realize that they
have problems they haven't recognized earlier.

I'm sure that you have already mentioned in your report that we are among a
small minority of instructors who tend to get to know our students and their
work, and that makes us the instructors that they turn to for letters of
recommendation for the Education Abroad Program, scholarships, grants, jobs,
transfers to other universities, internships etc.  I'm sure that we all
spend a number of hours every quarter going over former students' grades,
old essays and personal histories in order to write accurate and compelling
letters of recommendation.

I wonder whether the chair of the committee realizes that when we are
preparing for our classes, we have to read not only the whole texts that we
are teaching but other historical, biographical, political, psychological
and philosophical texts (many of which we may have read years earlier) in
order to help establish the context for class discussions of a particular
whole text.  Because our students are usually Freshmen, they have not yet
come in contact with these contexts through their other coursework, and yet
they need some background to help them understand the complexities of any
work that we assign them.

This may not be helpful because I have no idea how to quantify it.

Best,
Kathryn
 -- 
Dr. K. M. O'Rourke <kmo53 at charter.net>

> From: englecturers at lists.ucr.edu
> Reply-To: englecturers at lists.ucr.edu
> Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 19:10:32 -0700
> To: englecturers at lists.ucr.edu
> Subject: [Englecturers] workload committee meetings
> 
> Dispatches from the Workload Committee War Front
> 
> Dear Comrades:
> 
> The Workload Committee sloughs on.  The goal of the
> administration is to wear us down so that the final report on
> the request for a workload reduction looks like something
> straight out of Kafka - interminable proceedings that lead to
> nothing.  The Chair of this committee - he who shall remain
> nameless but is a Vice-Provost -informed us at our last
> meeting that he wants a report that is entirely descriptive.
> In other words, nothing evaluative.  When we informed him
> that even descriptive language implies connotation and that
> CONCLUSIONS MUST BE DRAWN, he merely looked befuddled.  I
> personally believe that he is reading too much Stanley Fish,
> or is it too charitable of me to suggest that administrators
> read anything, or that they need a theory to believe that all
> meaning is meaningless.
> 
> There is a willful obtuseness on the part of said
> administrator who, despite how many times we have told him
> what it is we do and what it is that composition requires as
> a discipline, remains strangely incapable of understanding
> why it is we are entitled to parity with other UC campuses on
> the issue of workload.  We are asking for seven courses to be
> a full time workload, and although we have demonstrated why
> this should be so for weeks now, and have asked for a motion
> to vote on this proposal, we still find ourselves needing to
> prove our case once again.
> 
> Born of desperation, I have suggested that I write a report
> for the Committee, a catalogue raisonne if you will, of what
> we do, how we do it, and why.  We need to demonstrate how
> many hours over the 40-hour week we work and why we can't
> legitimately reduce those hours.  There are, of course, some
> things we can stop doing --  writing letters of
> recommendation perhaps, or talking to students about their
> lives and giving advice about classes, or limiting email
> time -- that might be things we do which are not necessary to
> our pedagogical responsibilities.  I'm sure if we think about
> this, we can come up with other things we do that aren't
> strictly necessary to our work.  This could give us some
> areas in which we could conceivably mitigate our workload.
> On the other hand, there are things we can't and shouldn't
> stop doing - like limiting time spent to help students write
> better papers!  Strange as it may seem, the administration
> doesn't understand why composition teachers should actually
> help students beyond the office hours assigned.  Even though
> we have patiently explained that seeing students beyond
> office hours in one-on-one tutorials, and that includes time
> spent with students via email and blackboard, are necessary
> components of our work, and the standard practice of
> composition teachers, and the recognized practice as outlined
> in the report of NCTE, they are SHOCKED, I tell you, SHOCKED,
> to discover this is a necessary practice.  Everything else we
> do shocks them as well.  Grading papers and evaluating
> problems - shocking.  Isn't there a computer program that
> just does all this, we were asked?  They don't understand why
> Blackboard is time consuming either - or in fact why
> technology complicates our jobs rather than making it all
> easier and more efficient.  In short, they don't want to give
> us parity and everything we do seems to them unnecessary.
> 
> Linda, Ben, and I (with a lot of help from Katherine),
> however, remain your stalwart refusniks.  We refuse to let
> our pretty dreams of freedom be ground down by their
> jackboots.  The ways of the mighty are harsh and cruel and
> quixotic, but we refuse to write a report that doesn't DRAW
> CONCLUSIONS!  If we don't get consensus on this report, we'll
> just write our own.  It would be best, of course, if the
> entire committee voted to reduce the course load.  We need to
> finish this report before the end of the month.  Any and all
> help you could give me outlining what you do as part of your
> professional obligations as composition teachers and how long
> it takes you to do it, will be greatly appreciated.  I might
> add, that it is a given that we need to work on committees,
> keep up with our professional development, and the like, as
> part of our responsibilities.  That will all go toward some
> part of our IWC's.  What I need now is just something much
> more straightforward:  what we do and how long it takes to do
> it.  (I know, I know, I could have said all that in a two-
> line email).
> 
> I know nothing can happen until after we get all our grades
> in, but I will start compiling this report right after
> Tuesday, and I expect I'll be working on it all through next
> week.  We need to be finished with all of this by June 30.
> That means I need to finish the report, send it out to all of
> you for your final ok, and then distribute to the committee,
> and then the committee has to vote on it, and the final
> committee report needs to be written.  But we will prevail!
> Remember:  this ain't no party/ this ain't no disco/this
> ain't no fooling around...
> 
> Yours in solidarity,
> 
> Stephanie
> 
> 
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