What To Do?

Even though I'm technically on vacation, I'm still getting myself ready for the next semester. For the fall, I was originally going to scrap my whole heavy assignment workload for my students and just give them four exams to base their grades on. There were two reasons for this. One, I was tired of all the whining from the students about the "insane amount of work" I gave them. Mind you this was just five small writing assignments on top of weekly quizzes. They are history classes. Only English classes give more papers. Two, and this was the main reason, I don't want to grade all of them. This has nothing to do with laziness on my part. If I could, I would give ten papers a semester. However, the quality of my students' writing has seriously declined over the years and sometimes these papers are very painful to read (see some of my earlier posts). On top of that, I have a heavy grad school load in the fall. As it has been made clear to me that I'm not going to get the cherished tenure line, my priorities have shifted. I'd rather spent 20 hours a week working on my grad classes, getting A's, so I can get into a choice PhD program.

Here's the problem: I'm still a teacher at heart. When I was positive I was going to throw out the writing assignments, I read the unofficial evaluations I gave my students this week. A good majority of my students liked the writing assignments and they believed they actually learned something from them. There were only a handful of students that whined, including one who reminded me that this was a community college and not Harvard. I got a good laugh out of that one. The teacher in me is saying "damn, I'm doing something right." To me, it's not so much whether or not they enjoyed the class but if they had learned something. And they did.

To put this in perspective, I'm teaching seven courses in the fall with over 200 students. If I kept the writing assignments in that means I'll be spending a great deal of time grading them. This will cut into my grad school time and leave me no chance for a life outside of work but the students will get the benefit. If I cut out the writing assignments this would allow me some free time to do important things like sleep and extra time for my grad classes which means I will actually benefit. I have thought of a middle ground of giving less assignments but that means I would just have enough time to sleep but no real "free time."

What do you suggest I do?

P.S. And no, the pay is rather pathetic so the money is not a factor.