School in the 2020-2021 Academic Year & Coronavirus (Part 1)

Parents Forum
5022

I don’t know if this applies to college, but for high school teaching, the standard expectation is that it takes about a 1:1 amount of time of preparation/grading/student-help/etc. to classroom face time (more if you’re new or teaching a new-to-you course or a course with a large lab component with setup/takedown).

Nearly every teacher I know takes a ton of work home (and no we don’t get paid for summers “off”) and cannot get all the grading/etc. done within the school day. At my school, the school day itself is over eight hours including helping after/before school. But I know that we are a bit on the high side for a public school.

So at a highly-ranked high school, it might be expected for a full-time load to be teaching four courses. Plus usually other supervisory/advisory/activity obligations.

If a college professor is teaching half as much (but maybe has TAs?) - then my guess is that this professor is 50% teaching and 50% research. As I understand it, the research typically leads to a lot of funding, prestige, and accomplishments for the university so it becomes a large priority for faculty.

If someone wanted to add two more hours of work to my day every day for the same pay (or even for more pay) - I would certainly balk at that, because like everyone, I have other obligations in my life. Going from 8-10 hours/day to 10-12 hours/day of labor with no consideration/compensation is certainly not something that should be expected even from giving, helpful, “we’re in this together” professionals.

The “we’re all in this together” I would apply to the fact that for instance, my colleagues and I have volunteered to do summer book collections, committee work around how to improve sanitation in schools for the fall, and other helping projects for our schools in our own free time.

5023

An interesting aspect of the pandemic is that it highlights flaws in our systems. Our educational system included. Lately we’ve seen many brand name retail outlets close and while most were already floundering, covid accelerated their demise. I expect the same to happen to many colleges across the US. Weighed down by heavy overhead, unmanageable contracts, and outdated practices these schools will flounder and ultimately fail. The future is for the nimble.

5024

I find it strange that my child’s middle and high school have the following policy which if not told otherwise by the stateof NY will continue going into Sept. Here it is: if the school is notified by the health dept that a child tests covid positive, then the school is closed the next day and deep cleaned. The day after that, the school reopens. Isnt that misguided? Isnt that a strange band-aid when in fact the kid was contagious the week before?

Here is another strange thing in terms of contact tracing. The school tells me the policy (unless things change) is that the Health Dept notifies the school that a kid tested positive. The school communicates to all that school’s students that there is a case. No effort is made by the school or Health Dept to contact trace or notify the kids in that kid’s class.

5025

I can’t speak for tenured faculty, nor for those who are tenure track, or even for other adjuncts, but I can describe a typical version of my own situation. For this Fall, I am scheduled for a class MWF 9-9:50, a Monday lab for the same course (12:00 – 1:50), and a course with another department MW 2:00 – 4:15. That’s nearly 9 hours of contact time. I am supposed to hold at least 2 office hours per week. Typically, I get to campus at least 30 – 45 minutes early, so that I can make photocopies, check emails, and gather myself for lecture, etc., as well as to allow for weather or traffic conditions. Allow for cleaning boards, answering student issues, etc. so say 14 hours for all that. Both classes cap at 24 students.

There are some general “rules of thumb” for how long one should expect to spend on preparation and grading. For classes I have taught previously, 3 hours/(hr of contact time) is ballpark, although it depends on how long it has been since I taught the course, whether the textbook has changed, etc. (I once taught a first-time compressed summer course that was 4-5 hours per class-hour.) I have a lot of assignments, labs, and exams, so the grading alone can be considerable, particularly at mid-terms. Given 3 hours/class hour that amounts to around 27 hours for various prep and grading efforts. Plus the 14 hours noted above comes to around 41 hours. Of course, it varies from week to week and there are a lot of variables, but it’s a reasonable estimate *for myself *.

As an adjunct, I have no worries about research, writing, publications, meetings with research students and colleagues, conferences, administrative duties, etc. Of course, I’m scheduled to be paid ~~$7500 for the semester, so there’s that. If you double the contact time, you’re adding *at least * another 9 hours. It’s against College (or maybe the whole system) policy to assign that many contact hours, and even if you managed to get around that you would still have to pay lectureship wages (i.e. a lot more $$). The most I’ve had was 12.5 and I got lectureship for that.

5026

^^of course, if they doubled contact time of adjuncts, all of a sudden many might be considered full time employees eligible for benefits. (a good thing, IMO, but costly for the U)

5027

I actually get benefits where I am if I have at least 2 courses/ semester. The adjuncts are in the UUP. The health insurance is one of the main reasons I carry on at this point. When I was at local privates there were zero benefits of any sort.

5028

What professors do…

Teaching, research, service

In class teaching hours
Class prep
Grading
Creation of new courses
Regular office hours
Extra office hours as needed
Counseling for majors
Letters of recommendation for current and former students,
Letters or support for colleagues. (Promotion, New jobs, etc)
Writing grant applications
Proofing, editing, grant applications for current students, former students, colleagues
Research in field
Writing books and articles
Proofing, editing books and articles for others
Writing reviews of books and articles that are then published
Organizing and attending academic conferences in this country and internationally
Directing undergraduate research, including honors theses and other kinds of writing. Get it published.
Directing grad student research, including dissertations, and then supporting those students in their careers.
Administrative work: chair of dept, grad admissions chair, director of undergraduate studies, director of graduate studies, all sorts of university committees
Lots of meetings
Serving on editorial boards
Participating in professional organizations, US and international
Serving as officer of professional organization

Just off the top of my head, as an interested and not very observant bystander

My impression is most professors regularly work more than 40 hours a week, especially those running labs.

5029

I don’t know about your second paragraph, but the first paragraph makes sense to me. The one thing you need to remember about coronavirus is that it is very easy to kill. Soap and water will kill it on humans. Cleaning products used approriately will kill it. A deep cleaning will kill coronavirus in a school.

5030

5015, Homermom: I answered (just based on personal observation) because it's an excellent question imho and not at all naive. How would most people know the answer? I certainly wouldn't have any idea about it except for family and friends in academia.

5031

If our high school closes every day that someone gets the virus then we will never be in school. Come on. They say they will be cleaning each night. Won’t that be enough?

As for professors and their workloads. I guess they max out at 40 hours? My husband works more like 55 hours. 40 hours seems like a pretty cushy gig. I don’t know many salaried people in other industries working 40 hours a week. We know a lot of k-12 teachers who work a lot more hours but we also know some that we doubt work even 40. Sometimes our kids would wait weeks for something to be graded. As for college faculty and that list above, no way the any one prof is doing 1/3 of that each week. For example, S19’s English professor taught two classes. Three hours each per week. She was available for office hours upon request and was very available. She revised their essays but the kids wrote a total of two essays (very long ones) in that class for the semester. I can’t imagine how the rest of the week was filled. I guess by some of the stuff on that list but, still, if you asked her to meet with students face to face for three more hours per week that doesn’t seem like much to ask.

5032

Like your husband, and many others in both white collar and blue collar jobs, many professors work way more than 40 hours per week.

5033

At most universities, professors are also required to PUBLISH. Your odds of getting tenure (or even a tenure-track job) are dependent on your publications. Which aren’t easy to get, btw. After you get tenure, your raises depend on it. Publishing means research, writing, and sending out your work to journals, sometimes many times. If your research demands funding (say, you need to travel, or to buy materials or to fund a lab) you will need to find, write and compete for grants to fund that research. All very time consuming, I can assure you. In science research, you sometimes do more grant writing than science.

Professors are also required to sit on many committees and to perform administrative functions for the university. Despite what you hear about all those bloated administrations (and some are) at many schools it’s professors who perform a lot of the functions. My husband had a year where the committees he sat on required more than 20 hours per week. In addition to all his other responsibilities.

When my husband was a professor, 30% of his salary depended on “service” to the university. Being on various committees which ran the university. 30% of his salary depended on his publications. And 30% of his salary depended on student evaluations of his teaching, his accessibility via office hours and beyond and his relationships with students.

Which is a long way of saying, for most faculty, being a professor is really more than a 40 hour per week job.

5034

So perhaps if a college is using the 30%-30%-30% model that @katliamom mentions all they need to do is shift to a 0%-0%-100% model where all of their time is allocated to the academic success of the university during the next few semesters to get over all the covid issues.

5035

@katliamom super helpful. Thanks. @Rivet2000 I’m not sure which responsibilities could just be suspended during the pandemic but that is a thought for sure.

5036

It seems like it would be remiss to not contact the children sitting in the desk beside the covid positive kid. That seems strange to me. The school says it is a privacy issue.

5037

@silverpurple when we had a possible case in March, they would not release the name either. But, if contact tracing is a thing come fall, I would think families would be contacted if the infected student had been sitting next to their child for more than 15 minutes? Or would they have to have been less than six feet apart. Ugh. Who knows? I hope someone out there is thinking that through.

And, again, if our 3000 student high school has to close every time anyone gets the virus we won’t even be in school. How disruptive would that be? Teachers are supposed to be ready to teach in class or online any given day and they won’t know until each day how class will be taught? I don’t even get that. Not possible.

5038

In my experience, colleges were proactive in sending students with the flus home. I remember several kids who ended up back at home for that reason. There were not enough of them to close down the dorms, classes , however. From what I can see , COVID19 diagnoses in the college age crowd are not that many either. It didn’t spread in schools among kids like it did on cruise ships and Nursing homes where the population is particularly vulnerable

5039

I’ll ask my own naive question. Why do you want so much to send your kid to an institution where you think the employees are all a bunch of lazy entitled people with cushy jobs? I could have applied for tenure-track positions after I finished my PhD, but there is no way in Hades I wanted to go through what they go through at this juncture in my life. So I just have my cushy job with the near-minimum wage pay.

5040

Ok. I just thought of something. Let’s say kids are tested when they first come to school to make sure they don’t currently have the virus. (I’m not talking about antibody testing now because they seems like a hot mess with false positives and negatives.)

After making anyone quarantine who might have the virus, then what? Yes, kids with symptoms will likely want to be (have to be?) tested but will there be any tests to just be testing a percentage of kids at random? If 35-40% of cases are asymptomatic and kids who feel fine aren’t tested, then I guess we’ll never know truly how many kids on campus are infected. They’ll just be making sure to find the kids, faculty, and staff who show symptoms I guess?

5041

Maybe 30-70… because professors still would be needed to help run the university. Those committees they’re required to serve on serve key functions - space allocation, budgets, peer reviews, accreditation issues, hiring, student disciplinary committees, faculty/staff disciplinary committees – that’s just the tip of the iceberg – all these will need to be in place and functioning if the university is open and functioning.