In a recent episode of the The American Vandal, Christopher Newfield suggested the political importance of lifting the veil on academic labor, and that one of the ways we could do that is simply by being more open and honest about what our working conditions are like. And it’s true: my colleagues and I rarely talking to each other about what it looks like to do the work we do, and we rarely share that information with others outside the university. That secrecy likely hinders the quality of our work, and it makes us vulnerable to the kinds of narratives that forces hostile to the academy (and the Humanities especially) like to tell about us. It also leaves uncontested the kinds of well-meaning but unhelpful assumptions that circulate about academic labor. The most common one of those I hear is that we “get summer’s off,” a mistaken belief that obfuscates the immense amount of unpaid labor that happens when we’re not teaching, labor that includes course prep, research, and even sometimes service.
Anyway, the podcast episode is worth listening to in full. Going forward, I thought I might do a series of posts about specifically my academic work, and I thought one place to start would be some basic time accounting (which Newfield also suggested). What follows is a walkthrough of what my Tuesdays and Thursdays look like this quarter. I’ll do separate posts about my Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, as well as my weekends because, yes, I almost always work on weekends.
5:00am
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I usually arrive in my office around 7am. Technically, my workday starts earlier than this, at home, when I log into my email around 5am to see if there is anything urgent that I need to respond to. For the next hour, I’m prepping for class later that morning by organizing notes and reviewing the assigned reading. If we have a film assigned to discuss in class, then I may try to re-watch portions of the film in the morning so I have it fresh in mind. Around 5:45am, I break for breakfast, walk the dog and get ready to go to work.
7:00am – 9:00am
I arrive at my office on campus, set up my computer, make some coffee and get to work prepping for class. In previous years, this has meant creating and/or revising a set of PowerPoint slides with key ideas and passages to cover in class. Creating a new set of slides takes about 4-5 hours. Revising a set of slides can take 1-3 hours, depending on the degree of revision. This means writing the text, selecting images and support videos, and organizing everything in a way that’s clear and easy to read.
Now, since I’ve moved away from PowerPoint in an effort to “de-tech” my classes, I’ve taken to drafting lengthy lecture outlines in Word or Google docs that contain the basic ideas I’d like to cover. At 12-point, double-spaced font, these documents can run anywhere between 3-8 double-sided pages. Included in these outlines are a series of questions to help promote class discussion. They also include page numbers or time codes for specific passages or scenes that I want to discuss in class. The best classes are the ones in which students’ own comments provide the entry points into covering key ideas. Those classes feel organic in how they unfold, but as students’ energy lags over the course of the quarter, they are less common. That means I must rely on lecture more than class discussion, which also usually means more detailed notes. HOWEVER: nothing seems to sap the energy and attention from the room more than when I read from a script, so the detailed set of notes really serves to lay out in my own mind the planned trajectory of the class session, and then the aim of the actual session itself is to reproduce that trajectory, or at least hit all of its key points, without reading from notes or off of PowerPoint slides.
In addition to preparing for lecture, I also use these two hours before class in the morning to write and finalize any handouts I plan to give students. In my LGBT Lit class, this usually means a list of key terms they should know for exams. I create such a document once a week and hand it out on the second day of class so that it doesn’t contain anything that we haven’t covered. Once this document has been written and proofread, I create a PDF of it and post it to the class Canvas site. I’ll also print enough hard copies of the handouts to distribute in class.
I should note here that anytime I print or want to photocopy something, I need to walk from my office to the department office, which is down a hallway and up a flight of stairs. This gets annoying if I have to reprint documents and thus have to make multiple trips back and forth between my office and the printer.
9:00am – 9:10am
I pack up my computer, notes, and other materials, eat a quick snack, hit the bathroom, then walk to class. Currently, classes at Cal Poly start at ten past the hour. This will change when we move to semesters.
9:10am – 11:00am
The typical meeting pattern at Cal Poly for lecture and seminar courses is 110 minutes, twice a week (this also will change when we move from quarters to semesters, as more kinds of time patterns will be available). This quarter, I have both of my classes stacked on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Normally, I would be teaching three different class sections per week, but one of those class sections has been bought out this quarter through my supervision of various student projects over the past six years. Once faculty supervise 12 senior project students (this work is almost always done on top of one’s standard teaching load), then one has accrued enough credit equal to one 4-unit class section. I supervised my twelfth project in the spring, so now I’m finally compensated for that work. (On the books, I am technically teaching a third class, but this mainly involves doing the administrative work of inputting senior project grades from other faculty into the online system. So, while this amounts to no more than 1-2 hours per quarter, even this work is in excess of my standard teaching assignment).
Back to my classes: My morning class on Tuesdays and Thursdays is a GE (general education) course, so a course that students from any major can take to satisfy a set of requirements that all students have. Most of my teaching consists of upper-division GE courses in Area C, which covers the Humanities. Next year, this will undergo a name change to GE Area 3 supposedly to bring it into alignment with the rest of the CSU system.
Anyway, 110 minutes is a long time for a GE class, and so I usually try to break it up into sections:
- The first 10 minutes consists of going over administrative details for the course, collecting assignments, and reminding students of what deadlines may be looming.
- The next 10-15 minutes involves going over the material that we’ve covered in previous classes. During this time, I will also do a pre-discussion prompt to see if any students have any burning reactions to the reading they wanted to get out before I move into lecture. The best class sessions are the ones where these pre-discussion prompts organically flow into the key topics for the day, and lecture gets woven in and out of class discussion in 5–15-minute chunks. Those kinds of sessions are uncommon–though perhaps not as rare as one might think.
- If the magic doesn’t happen in those first 5-15 minutes, then the next 20-35 minutes consists of lecture on new material, usually historical background or the introduction of concepts that students need to understand the assigned material. Students’ attention usually fades out after about 30 minutes of lecture, not to mention I get tired from talking for that long. Conservatively, this puts the class at about the 40-minute mark.
- At this point, if I have a talkative class, then I will try to engage them in a discussion about the assigned text by asking a series of sometimes very basic questions to help them find a purchase in the material. Sometimes these are as basic as “So what did you think?” The logic of such a simple, “book club”-grade question is that nonce aesthetic judgments can be developed into something more rigorous. Once class discussion (hopefully) gets going, we’ll work our way through 1-3 examples out of the text or break to cover another of the assigned texts.
- When creating a syllabus, I usually assign multiple texts that allow for a productive comparison and contrast OR where one text can serve as an example for a theoretical text. For example, when I cover AIDS literature in my LGBT lit class students read work by Gil Cuadros, Thom Gunn, and Justin Chin, who all have very different styles. When I teach Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” I pair it with Andy Warhol’s “Mario Banana #1” and Frank O’Hara’s “Poem [Lana Turner Has Collapsed]” to serve as both examples and alternative takes on camp.
- If it is not a talkative class, then, after a few minutes of trying to solicit responses from students via both direct questions and free writing prompts, I’ll switch to lecturing again, usually walking students through my own close readings of these texts. As the quarter goes on and students become more exhausted, the amount of lecturing I do typically increases. In some ways, lecturing is easier, but it’s more tiring, both physically and mentally. (If you don’t believe me, then try standing, pacing, and talking for 110 minutes straight. The classrooms often come with a desk and chair for the instructor, so it is possible to sit, but that means you lose visual on students in the back half of the class, which typically means lower engagement from them.)
- I’ll devote the last 5-10 minutes of class to reviewing what we’ve just covered and to giving students a reminder about what’s on deck for the next class session. With a 110-minute session, we have a built-in 10-minute break. I used to take these at the halfway point in the class session, but now I tend to just power through and end class ten minutes earlier than if I took the break earlier. I tell students that if they need to go to the restroom, they should just get up and go. (It feels weird when they ask me for permission to do that. Why should anyone need permission to use the bathroom? The answer is that they shouldn’t. And they don’t.)
A note on class periods: There is no pedagogical reason for why lecture/seminar class sessions are 110 minutes in length. It has to do with course credits, whereby students get so much credit for so many hours of instruction. 4 units of credit (on the quarter system) means that students are in class for 4 unit hours per week (220 minutes total) and expected to complete 440 minutes of work toward the course outside of class per week, or roughly 8 hours outside of class for every 4 hours in class. But it’s not as if there have been studies that show 110 minutes is the optimal time for learning or that such studies, if should they exist, are the reason why our classes are as long as they are. Instead, it’s a casualty of the drive to quantify learning without a sense of whether the result is actually a good for education.
10:50am – 11:00am
I usually have 1-2 students who want to ask a question one-on-one at the end of every class session. Some students just want to chat, which is nice. I do all of this while wiping down the whiteboard and packing up my materials. Then, I make my way back to my office (or, in different quarters, I could be making my way to another classroom. Here, ending class 10 minutes early rather than taking a break affords more time to get around as sometimes I have to walk across the entire campus to get to my second classroom and 10 minutes isn’t enough time, especially if I need to take bathroom break or eat a snack or have a line of students with questions at the end of the class session.)
11:00am – 12:00pm
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, this hour is known as university hour. Few courses run during this time, and instead it’s available to hold department meetings and other events. In the English department, we usually don’t meet unless we need to discuss something related to curriculum, hiring, a question from the dean, etc. English department meetings always happen on a Tuesday. However, I also teach in the Women’s, Gender & Queer Studies department, which schedules its department meetings for every other Thursday to avoid conflicting with other department meetings. Most of the faculty in WGQS have their appointments in other departments, meaning that the work they do for WGQS is a kind of volunteer work done on top of the work they’re required to do for their home departments. That means I’m often attending department meetings twice a week.
Depending on whether I’m able to attend the meeting over Zoom, I’ll usually eat my lunch during this meeting. If it meets in person, then I’ll hold off on lunch until 12pm and try to eat a snack in the 10-15 minutes I have between the end of my morning class and the start of the meeting.
If I don’t have a meeting, then I start preparing for my next class at 2:10pm. Over the years, I’ve learned that I should never teach a class immediately after a department meeting. Often my mind is too involved in department business, or I’m just too irritated to concentrate on my teaching material. So, if I teach in the afternoons on Tuesdays and Thursdays, then I try to space out the next class so it starts no sooner than 2pm.
12:00pm – 2:00pm
Regardless of whether I have a meeting from 11-12pm, I devote these two hours to more course prep. Unlike the class I teach at 9:10am, the 2:10pm is a seminar for English majors. Since it’s a different class, I can’t use any of the material I prepped that morning, so I spend this time re-reading the assigned reading, taking notes, and formulating discussion questions. Seminar courses are both harder and easier than the GE courses. More often than not, a room full of English majors is more capable of generating and sustaining a conversation on their own than GE students, owing in part to a greater level of intrinsic interest in the course topics and disciplinary knowledge. Those students are trained in treating conversations as research methods. However, these courses are harder because the students have more specialized knowledge. They will keep you on your toes, which makes the classes more intellectually engaging (and therefore more enjoyable) but also more challenging. This quarter, I had the foresight to do as much of the prep as I possibly could in the summer before the class started, but that still didn’t obviate the need to devise discussion questions and a general outline for each class session as a part of the weekly and daily prep.
An aside on course prep: I typically prefer not to have more than one course prep (basically all the work that goes into preparing to teach a course) on the same day. If I’m teaching multiple sections on the same day, then I want them to be the same course (so, two separate class sections of English 382, for example) because it allows me to focus on that material that day. This means I’m usually teaching M-R (four days a week). However, this quarter I opted to stack my classes on the same days, even though they are different preps. If I could do it again, I would have spread them out. Some of my tenure-line colleagues prefer to stack all their courses, which means teaching three sections and multiple preps on the same day, but that usually leaves 2-3 days of the week when they’re not teaching and can focus on other things. I tried that once. It nearly killed me.
2:00pm – 2:10pm
Walk to class and get set up in the room. Make sure my white board markers are working. Hook up my laptop if I need A/V for that day.
2:10pm – 4:00pm
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, this is my seminar class. It has fewer students, but as I mentioned before, these classes are more challenging because of the greater degree of specialized knowledge and training these students have. I’m often nervous walking into a seminar room because it feels less controlled than the GE course, but that also makes it interesting and exciting in a way that GE classes aren’t. Part of my nervousness comes from the fact that I don’t plan out as clear a structure for these classes. I expect advanced English students to be able to carry an intellectual conversation. To that end, I assign students presentations in which they give a short 8–10-minute talk on the assigned material for that day to set the direction for our conversation. Then, another student must deliver a 4–5-minute response. During these presentations, I’m writing down an evaluation on a rubric sheet that hopefully I remembered to print out during my prep hours and writing a separate set of notes toward summarizing and developing the ideas that students introduce during their presentations. Afterwards, I spent about 10 minutes at the board highlighting the key ideas from the presentation and then prompt students into a discussion. This quarter has been a dream: the students are active, engaged, with lots of smart things to say.
I try not to lecture too much in these seminars, but sometimes it’s necessary to summarize or explain dense theoretical concepts introduced in secondary readings. Preparing and delivering these lectures follows the same process as writing up lecture notes for my GE classes, but it can take twice as long because the readings are that much denser.
3:50pm – 4:00pm
Class wraps up. I wipe down the whiteboard, pack up my laptop, notes, and books, and then head back to my office.
4:00pm – 5:00pm
This is my office hour. Technically, it’s when I have an open door for students to come by and ask me questions about the course, etc. Sometimes students just stop by to chat, but that’s rare. Most of the time I’m sitting in my office trying to get caught up on emails that have piled up over the past three hours. Those emails consist of a mix of questions from students about the course, committee work, and other kinds of informational updates. At this point, I’m usually too tired to do anything that requires a lot of brain power, so if I’m caught up on email and I don’t have any students, then I’ll print out articles I plan to read for my own research, update my gradebook, or try to do some planning for the next day. Maybe I’ll watch a YouTube video, or something. I’ll also start cleaning up my office (empty out the coffee pot, straighten up my desk, etc.) so I don’t come into a complete mess the next time I’m in.
5:00pm – 5:30pm
I make my way home. Usually, I’ll check my email one last time once I’m home just to see if anything urgent came in. Otherwise, I’ll spend the evening decompressing from work.
Steven A. Ruszczycky, PhD 