But mostly I was successful because I had really fun students. Even this one!!
Class composition aside, here are, from my point of view, the pros and cons of summer teaching.
Pros
You can try new things in the classroom. My summer class was much smaller than my normal semester classes (20 vs. 30). I also have far fewer obligations during the summer, since committees are on break and most of the students are gone. As a result, I was able to try out some new-to-me group activities. Want to try out clickers for the first time? Dying to trade out tests for some other assessment tool? Summer can be a stress-free time for that. You have more prep time for the one class than you normally would. Also, you can quickly find out what works and what doesn't because....
You get instant feedback. If students don't understand something during the semester, they have a few options: 1. wait until the next class period (1, 2, or 4 days away, depending on class schedules), 2. wait until office hours, or 3. actually! type! an email! (students seem especially reluctant to use email here at PermaU...anyone else notice this?). In the summer, the students see me every day. Sometimes even twice a day. For multiple hours in a row. This gives them plenty of time to ask for clarification on lecture or get help with a problem set. I was able to catch problem students far ahead of midterms... more like on the second day of summer classes. As a direct result (and because the students actually did the work), my DFW rate was better than during the fall/spring semesters.
You gain new perspective on a course or course sequence. Teaching a semester's worth of material in four or five weeks really helped me to see the big picture much, MUCH more clearly. What do I really want my students to get out of my class? How does my class connect to other classes in the curriculum. It is a lot easier to see past the day-to-day details when you are only focusing on one class.
You get paid! Recall that most academic appointments at PUIs are nine month. Although paychecks might be spread over 11 or 12 months, you are really only paid for nine of 'em. While the money is a huuuuuge improvement over grad school stipends (for the love of the science gods, I would hope so), if you have a kid/house/expensive shoe habit, you can always use more dough. Note that I'm not saying it's good dough (see cons).
Cons
The pay is awesome. And in this case, by awesome I mean awesomely bad. My rate was not all that bad, especially since I had taught the class before (so no brand new prep to do). There was a catch: I didn't get any money until my grades had been submitted and then recorded by the registrar!
Two words: burn. out. If you teach in the first summer session, you probably get a very tiny break after spring finals get out. If you teach in the second session, you only have a week or two before fall classes start. Not only does this make it challenging to schedule vacation time, it does not give you a true break from teaching. Fatigue is something all profs battle, no matter what their institution's classification. Will you have enough time to recover?
There's no other place to run. During the regular semesters, I teach two or three different courses. Believe it or not, I actually teach some pretty boring shit from time to time (I know, shocking). It is rare that two classes have two boring lectures occurring on the same day, so I can always balance the boring prep or grading with another class's more entertaining stuff. When you only teach one course, you are stuck.
You get instant feedback. What? Wasn't this also a pro? Well, it goes both ways. Because everything is on hyperdrive in the summer, students don't get as much time to let the new material simmer. This can result in them taking their frustrations out on the prof. While this didn't happen to me personally, I did see it happen in the first summer session a lot.
I am sure I have left some things out. Perhaps something that I've listed as a con is actually, in your opinion, better interpreted as a pro. You know where to straighten me out.
