A modest proposal

So I've been thinking about teaching and academia, partly in response to a whole variety of posts in the last week or so, here, here, here, and here. (I think the discussion originally sprang up over at Dr. Crazy's but I can't remember in response to which post now.) At first I thought was I thinking was a comment, but really I think it's a slightly different take on the question, that actually may connect more with the work/life blog conference over at 11D.

I think a recurring issue in the first set of discussons has been couched in terms of what value academics place on teaching, when in fact it's not really about whether academics value teaching, but how they define what good teaching is. I have to confess that I have played the cynic here (like one of those senior grad students you encounter when you first start grad school, the ones who seem to say, "Yeah, that's right, be excited, love your subject, aim for greatness.... YOU'LL SOON LEARN."), and have emphasized in some of my comments that academia doesn't always value teaching (I would argue that in PhD-granting institutions, teaching is never going to garner you the praise and reward that research will. In fact, I would argue that in the profession as a whole, teaching is never going to garner you the praise and reward that research will. No one awards endowed chairs or MacArthur "genius" grants for teaching). While I stand behind that comment about academia as an institution, at the same time I'm firmly convinced that 93% of academics I've met are strongly dedicated to their teaching, consider it important, and seek nothing but to help students learn.

And yet, my modest proposal is to ask the good teachers out there, the ones who care, who bust their balls, to please, be maybe not so good. Slack off just a little. Or at least be very very careful when you assign those challenging papers, incorporate peer review and rewrites, institute new pegagodical techniques.

Before y'all stone me for a heretic, let me explain further.

Maybe one of the comments that triggered this came also from Dr. Crazy:

Well, I should be grading (and no, I will not be done with the mountains of grading until approximately mid-december and yes, it is my own fault for assigning all of this shit and actually caring that I teach my students instead of accepting the fact that I'm killing myself at this pace and should just stop worrying about whether they learn...)

She has another  comment along these lines:

Three hours of conferences. Three hours (ok, only 2 hours and 45 minutes) of teaching. My brain is fried, and I've got to be back at school at 9 AM for three more hours of conferences. I know that this is good for my freshmen (I will only go to these lengths for them), but it is... draining. I hate it when sound pedagogy translates into self-flagellation. It just sucks.

These are just isolated comments, but they made me think of the dangers of uber-dedication to teaching. I have two dear dear friends who have both left teaching after some years (one taught high school, granted, but one taught at the college level). Both of them were described by students as the best teacher they'd ever had. Students cited their classes as life-changing. The dedication and devotion that they inspired in their students was remarkable to see, and was a reflection not of any kind of pandering or coddling but followed in the wake of rigorous, demanding, and - yes - incredibly FUN classes. The college level friend is the best teacher that I have ever known.

And now neither of them are teaching.

They got burnt out; they couldn't separate teaching from the rest of their life. And teaching is an incredible mindsuck and timesuck that will take up every tiny speck of time and energy that you have, if you let it.

Over the years I repeatedly expressed amazement at the kind of work they put in to teaching - for instance, assigning 7 short papers and 7 essay tests in a class of 85 students (on top of another class of 70 students with a very similar assignments) at the same time as completely rewriting each day's lecture even though they'd taught the class before, because they need to be "fresh." Never mind meeting with 5-10 students a day, every day, for at least half an hour at a time, and each student feeling like they'd finally encountered the one person on campus who really cared about them and listened to them and would work to help them be the best that they could be. I asked if there weren't ways to give students a valid educational experience that  didn't require so much effort on the part of the instructor. I know at least one of them tried to revamp their assignments/workload, but just found different ways to overwork themselves.

Both friends, when they left teaching, said that they couldn't continue doing what they did, but they couldn't do it any other way.

And you know, that makes me MAD. It makes me angry because here are two people who really made a big difference in many students' lives, and now they're not doing it at all.

Wouldn't it be better for them to "slack" a little, and continue to be able to help students? Wouldn't helping students at, say, 75% of the level that you feel is "true" teaching, help more students than being unable actually to maintain that insane level of work required to produce such truly exceptional teaching?

And there's another friend, who is still teaching (college), who devotes herself to her students to the extent that she rarely spends time with her partner, eats right, gets sleep, etc. Many of us who know her are convinced she's going to have a heart attack by age 50. And then what good will that do anyone?

And what does this have to do with any of the previous blog posts I referred to above, again?  Well, maybe not a lot, directly. The comments just got me thinking about the different ways that we - academics, academia - talk about teaching, and how easy it is to get sucked into that black hole of teaching, and to find justification for that in a wide variety of discourses about teaching. I think it's actually often harder to pull back and advocate moderation without looking like you're a slacker teacher.

Research doesn't seem to me to have quite the same effect, but then, I'm not in a field with labs or anything like that, which would probably be quite different. Research is one of those things that you have to do (and which I love, don't get me wrong) but which doesn't present the same constant drain on energy and resources that teaching does (when you have deadlines looming certainly research sucks you in, but on most days, nothings going to go immediately wrong if I don't get my research prepped for 10 am the next morning, whereas it will if I don't get the teaching prepped). Although this may just betray my own biases.

So in the end this connects back to Laura's life/work blog over at 11D, which was all about how to balance work and life. And my modest proposal is a call for moderation. Don't buy into some of the discourses about what is or isn't appropriate performance, especially in terms of teaching.

Buy into survival instead.

Comments

[profgrrrrl]

I hear ya! I do feel mild guilt for not giving it my all, but I know that I can't. I'd keel over from the effort, I'd hate my life, and I wouldn't get tenure. Or, in other words, I like to sleep, have social moments, and research.

Teaching can suck you in. You could spend all day preparing if you wanted to. You can write more comments than the students did paper. But none of that necessarily correlates to how well the students learn, which is the bottom line. And I remind myself of that every time I feel like a bad prof for not going the extra mile. And then I get myself a treat and relax. Yeah.

[YelloCelllo]

Hmm, I read this and felt compelled to behave like someone in a 12-step program. "Hello, my name is Cello... and I'm a teach-aholic." Have lovingly -- but also guilelessly -- given too much to teaching for too long, and all at the expense of research. Became burned out, resentful. Am struggling for a better balance now. And reading posts such as yours help a lot. While I still personally revere the teacher who gives her all, I also have the sneaking suspecion that she (and it's almost always a she, right?) ultimately gets less respect from the students than the teacher who teaches well, but who also protects her research and personal time. (All comments above are based on my own experiences and colleagues and NOT on Dr. Crazy, whom I suspect handles the balance very well.)

[Mark]

I totally agree with this. You can work and work and it will surely help some of your students learn more and better but you may sacrifice the research in the end--- and that will do you no good. I also think that giving so much takes the onus off the students to be responsible for their own learning. Yes there is more that I could be doing but it will not be happening for the sake of making my students take responsibility and, most importantly, for the sake of my research. Also, by way of anecdote, I worked my butt off last year to train students in an arcane ancient language. I must say it was intense and loving and they learned so much! But hardly any of them went on to second year! A tribute to me that they stuck around for the entire year--for sure!---but the students we have at my school are not the kind to pursue subjects that tax them too much unless one gives and gives---and I can't and surely don't want to teach them in all their clases. So my thought on this is that I should not give so much, it is wasted effort to build a solid foundation that will not be used. This is my mantra this year and I am getting more of my research done.

[Dr. H]

I have this little rule that helps me stay balanced: I should be doing a comparable amount of work to what the students are doing. They should be doing at least as much, if not more, work on class outside of class in comparison to what I am doing to prep and grade!! So, sometimes if I am going turbo on the prepping, I keep it in check by reminding myself that this class is relatively not that important to my students, so why should I let it take over my life. (Does that sound terrible??) And when I am commenting, I try to keep in perspective the amount of time that students put into the papers, and my total time spent commenting shouldn't exceed the amount of time necessary for a student to have spent on writing an excellent paper. This balance perspective works for me.

If I am tempted to get sucked into my teaching, as a newbie, it's often because this is where I am getting more social interaction! So, I recognize this is part of the problem -- my desire to interact with humans -- and focus on ways to incorporate that interactions into my research and writing. I ask myself, "OK, is it time to forward some of the text on to someone else for feedback? Do I need a phone meeting with someone to talk through some research ideas? Do I need to go down the hall to check in with another person about my new ideas for analyzing a set of data / set up a meeting, etc.?" Sometimes my desire to put more time into teaching is really me acting out of a need for relatedness with others.

All of this is to say -- I agree with what you wrote. Nicely put.

[Biochick]

You are very right about how teaching and lab can be similar. I'm a laboratory scientist and hopefully, maybe, possibly someday a teacher, but the lab is just like the way you write about teaching. Timesuck. Mindsuck. Waking up at 3am from endless fretful dreams of experiments that aren't working, to realize that you may have left out an expensive, perishable reagent when you dashed home at 10pm after 14 hours in the lab to a hungry, lonely husband. The one thing about teaching is at least you can't get scooped by someone else in the field trying to do the same thing, so you are only competing against yourself. Of course, in competing with yourself that means there is never any end to it, so in that sense teaching is this endlessly perfectable process. And I agree that we should figure out how to just get on with it. But I wonder what to do about lab.

[What Now?]

NK--I was a bit disappointed to realize that your "Modest Proposal" didn't involve eating any babies! Otherwise, however, your proposal is excellent advice. Balance is something that I regularly struggle and rarely manage to achieve. I've started thinking of it in terms of stewardship: given the amount of time and energy that I have, how can I use it to the best advantage? Some of the most dedicated teachers that I've known weren't necessarily the wisest deployers of their own energy. One friend who burned out and left academia spent a, to my eyes, ridiculous amount of time and energy grading papers, sometimes spending over an hour on a four-page Freshman Comp paper...and to what end? What could she possibly write in her comments that would take her an hour and transform this student's life and writing? Or at least, what could she write that she couldn't have written in 20 minutes? I've decided over the years that less is often more, that students can only take in so many suggestions anyway, so anything more than those few comments actually detracts from their experience, so that they may actually learn less if I write more.

Of course, I'm much better at all of this deliberate moderation in theory than in practice!

[New Kid on the Hallway]

What Now?, I considered suggesting we eat the students, but thought perhaps it might not come across properly. ;-)

Biochick, thanks for your comments on the lab, which is a context I'm unfamiliar with. I lived downstairs from a biochemist once, who envied me for being able to work at home, while I envied him for not being able to! But I don't know what to do about the lab either - obviously if your virii or bacteria do what they do in the middle of the night you have to be there whether you want to be or not. I guess this is why scientists at big research places have all their grad students and post-docs working on their projects? I don't know what my liberal arts colleagues do.

Dr. H., I like your point about sociability. My discipline has a strong tradition of working alone so it reinforces that even more - if I want to deal with people, it's through teaching. Even with my colleagues we're more likely to talk about teaching than research!

YelloCello, one of the things your comment made me think of was how one of my exemplars was adjunct/temporary/contingent faculty (whatever term you prefer - full-time, but not tenure-track). Which made it even harder b/c there was no institutional support for their research, and the only way they could really demonstrate their value to the institution was through teaching, and it was a terrible catch-22 b/c the more they taught, the less they researched, the less likely they were to get a t-t job....but this person did in the end pull the plug themselves, they could have stayed in that position longer and didn't.

Mark - my sympathies (and yay for arcane languages! most fond of those myself.)

[Dr. Crazy]

Came to this thread very late, as I took the entire weekend off from the computer (and grading!) - so inadvertantly I took your advice. Here's the thing with me and teaching - sometimes I am a crazy teacher-holic, but other times I'm a total slacker. I strive for balance, but it just can't happen sometimes (a lot of the time, maybe, because balance is not something I'm good at generally)....

But yes, 75% instead of 100% is necessary in order not to be completely burnt out.... and I'd also add that one thing I do is, for example, in my Freshmen class I do not prep. I teach all stuff I've taught before, and I spend time only on grading/conferences in there outside of class (unless we count the 10-min drive to school as prep-time). In other classes, I tend to spend more time on prep and less on grading. It's not a perfect system, but I think that it does help to portion out the workload this way....

[DocC]

Very helpful suggestions re balance. & now a confessional moment: in the effort to protect my time, I've become a hard-ass in a way that I think may make me a less good teacher, and certainly lowers my student evaluations (at least from certain students). I just had 4 students (in a class of 37) misunderstand an assignment so thoroughly that I gave them an F. Some accepted this; one complained that the assignment wasn't clear. Once I would have given partial credit, or allowed re-writes. (This is, BTW, a 1-page assignment; there are 9 during the course of the semester & they can either skip one altogether or drop the lowest grade, so this isn't a make-or-break thing.) Anyway, I grade these things all at once, one fell swoop, & I can do them fast; that's why they're short. I refused to allow any re-write or make-up or partial credit on this. Read the assignment; pay attention in class; contact me if anything's not clear; but once it's in, it's in, that's that. So I'm posting because I feel faintly guilty--but also feel that I'm doing the right thing for my research responsibilities (I'm at an R1). Maybe I should have "seized the teaching moment"--I'm afraid these students will learn only that I'm a bitch, rather than anything more useful. BUT I have a break coming up & I want to work full-bore on my own stuff, rather than having stray student papers--even just short ones--around cluttering up the to-do list.

So shoot me.