Just a teacher...(rant)

The semester began on Monday for us - I have three classes on a T/R schedule and one on a M/W schedule. My M/W is late afternoon and the T/R schedule is 8 - 1:30. Talk about polar opposites, at least in my teaching world. I am very excited about having Fridays "off" - from teaching anyways.

I have come across too many people who seem to think that I work only 15-20 hours a week since I'm a "teacher" - so not the case. I may spend 15-20 hours a week in the classroom and holding office hours, but I have a lot of other things that I have to do for my job: preparation for that teaching - the length of this depends on my course, some are more work than expected. Generally, this is somewhere between 5-12 hours per week. Last semester I swear I spent 5-10 hours/week alone on 1 prepartion. Then there is all that pesky grading - probably another 5 hours. In addition, then students expect you to answer emails, meet outside of your office hours, etc. Probably another 2-3 hours a week. So just for "teaching" I spend 27 - 40 hours a week just on teaching. Now if that was all I had to do, I would think that was a pretty sweet deal too. But now let me list some of the other things that we have to do:

Meetings/Serve on committees: approximately 4-6 hours per week
Mentor/Advise students: 2-3 hours per week
Paperwork/documentation: 1-2 hours per week
Course discussions about curriculum/changes/assessment/etc: 2-3 hours per week
Research: Supposed to be 10%-20% of our time - so about 4-8 hours if a 40 hour week.

Grand total of hours: 40 - 62

Maybe that gives everyone a better idea of what a professor does (tenure/tenure-track anyways) and maybe help you understand why we always seem so busy and are hard to get ahold of!

Thanks for listening to the rant...