A Crazy Cat's Life

I found a link to another professor who wanted to dispel the myths that teachers have the "easy life." It is so true. Yes, we may only actually teach 15 hours a week but what we do outside the classroom is enormous. Here is my typical day: 7:45am - Alarm goes off. Hit snooze button. 8:15am - Realize I have to get out of bed and shower ASAP. 8:30am - Out the door to work with a stop at Dunkin' Donuts to pick up my coffee. 10:00am - Arrive at school. Yes, my commute is that long. 10:15am - Go through my mail, sort through the numerous worthless books the publishing companies send to me and respond to the huge list of e-mails sent to me in the middle of the night by "panicked" students. 11:00am - Go to class and teach. The first 10 minutes are a waste of time because about 1/4 of the class shows up late (even though they know they lose points for lateness) and I would have to repeat everything I said. Then I can finally lecture. Hopefully I won't catch ...

Normally Fridays are my day off. My chance to sleep in, do nothing, and all out veg. With physical therapy, however, that had to change. Teaching Monday through Thursday and then having to go to PT three of those nights was too much. So now I do PT on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. This also gives me a chance to go into the office and get some work. So, I'm driving to PT this morning and the weirdest thing happened to me: I had to slow down to let a wild turkey cross the road. Turkeys are not rare sightings where I live but it is very rare to see a lone turkey, and even more so that it was a female. It was just really weird. Then, my day got better. I received some student evaluations from last spring. I know that I am a good teacher but students these days are lazy and I make them think (OMG....I'm so horrible). Anyways, even I was surprised by these evals. Every single one of the sixty-some-odd students said they would recommend me to other students. Damn. Also, ...

Oh boy I hope not. It's bad enough that I'm in the middle of grading papers and exams, but then some bad news came across to me. I was hired as an "Instructor" which is a semester-by-semester temporary full-time appointment (one of many "contingent" faculty positions). It can be renewed for up to eight semesters. My college tends to keep the people for the full eight semesters. Heck, why not? We are not tenure-track and we get paid a lot lower than people who are tenure-track. And the way I look at it, anything is better than being an adjunct (part-time professor). However, our new president wants to get rid of this position and has stated that he will be limiting the term of the position to no more than four semesters. I heard those of us currently working will be "grandfathered" to the eight-semester track but there has not been any definite proof of this. Now, I work in the summers. Do those count as "semesters?" No one can tel...

Thanks PhD comics for illustrating the life of college grading!

A colleague just forwarded me the following article that came out in the Washington Post last week. "Me: If It's All About You, You're in Trouble. Why a Sense of Entitlement Can Wreak Havoc on Happiness." It does a great job of explaining the problems of today's youth and their belief that everything should be handed to them. Welcome to my life. Oh, and did I mention the student who in the first month of class asked me the following questions: How do I write an essay? How do I do research? What does ____ mean? (a lot of basic English words...and no it is not a foreign student) How do I save a file? How do I upload a file to Blackboard? (the online program the school uses) My question: how the fuck did you get out of high school? Goes back to banging my head against my desk. P.S. I found a great blog called Rate My Students where other faculty members bitch about their students. It's nice to know I'm not alone. :)

Well, I think I started hating them the first week of classes. I don't know what it is this semester but all my colleagues and I are having bad classes. The kids are incredibly whiny and bitchy. There is this strong sense of a "why do I have to do this?" attitude. One of my friends called it an extreme case of "entitlement," namely they are so good that everything should be handed to them. I've had a few of them myself. Couple of cases in point: I give out a review sheet. It's pretty much what is on the test but full of generalizations (i.e. "the characteristics of absolutism"). This means they have to go into the notes and study what the characteristics are. I'm not going to give them all the info. I don't have time for that crap. One student got all pissy and said "what? I have to look this up?" like I was some sort of evil bitch making him scrounge around in dumpsters naked, or something just as horrible. Um, hel...