When I started teaching, it took me four to six hours to prep a brand new lecture. Intro or not. No one told me if this was reasonable, but then again, I certainly didn't ask. I was exceptionally embarrassed by the sheer amount of time I spent before each 60 minute lecture.
I've since taught my intro class several times, but I still spend between 60-90 minutes on prep. Mostly I have ppt slides already prepared from previous years, but I still work out example problems for board work. I also usually need to make minor changes to slides for various reasons (new idea, new problems book, etc.) My upper level classes typically take three to five hours to prep. Still. Good grief.
Many of you, I'm sure are faster at class prep. (I'm looking at you, GMP and Dr. Pion! And thanks for your enlightening posts!)
I want to work with JaneB! Care to join me, Namnezia and pika? JaneB wrote,
"My department has a workload model. It assumes 6 hours of prep time per new classroom hour and 2 hours per old (i.e. repeated) classroom hour, which is a general average across the whole (highly interdisciplinary) department."
That's pretty darn close to my current course prep times. Maybe I should think about relocating?
11 comments:
Since I don't do course prep, I didn't look at the poll. Did it have a bunch of extra es in it? If not, poor PP obviously had no idea what it said. So of course it made no sense to him.
I would, of course, love to work with JaneB too, though I have zero desire to rejoin the ranks in academia.
I believe that class prep robs me of time I could be otherwise dedicating to my research, intellectual growth, or enjoyment of life. My main fear is to turn one day into one of those overworked, exhausted, washed out professors who remained completely unknown in their fields because teaching took up all their time.
I had to school myself to spend as little time as possible on class prep. It wasn't easy because the temptation to immerse myself in class prep and avoid the hardships of research is big.
Still, now I don't spend any time prepping for courses I have taught before. Not one minute. I don't want classes to be over-rehearsed. For new courses, I design a syllabus that is so detailed that it cuts down prep a lot. My general rule is that if I'm doing more than 1 hour of prep per week (altogether, not per class hour), then I'm doing something completely wrong.
Have not ever regretted the time I spent in class prep for labs I TA'd a very long time ago, somewhat according to the hours you posted above (a lot for first lecture, a lot less for second time, but still much more prep than if I did it for several years running, which I didn't have the chance to try). I still run into students and can say somewhat truthfully (boasting), I taught them everything they know. (Well, not quite, for others I can say they forgot everything I taught.)
Teaching is important. I was never good at impromptu, might be better at it now.
If I had everything on Powerpoint, it would take me a LOT longer to prepare for each class even with semester-to-semester overlaps. Chalk is a lot easier to erase, for some reason.
I teach a physics class that meets 5 days a week. So that particular formula from JaneB says I should have prepped 30 hours plus be in class for 5 the first time around, and that doesn't count grading. (Or does it?)
And did I mention that I teach a different physics class (2nd semester) that also meets 5 days a week? Those two alone add up to 70 hours a week in the JaneB Univ model for the first time I taught those classes, and would have required some 14 hour days (plus grading?) mid week if I hadn't gotten ahead on the weekends.
I don't think it came anywhere near that amount of time, but fortunately I was not teaching a lab or responsible for the lab that first time around. I also had MUCH smaller classes than I have now.
PS -
One factor that might matter is that I can work a problem for my own purposes in 1/4 the time it should take a student on a test and maybe 1/10 the time it takes to do it and explain it on the board. Most thought goes into problem selection. And sometimes I'll work a problem that a student asks from the book without any prep, or make a new one up because the old one looks boring to me. Those take zero prep time, although I might have to make a note of it for the next time around if I really like it.
I spend a lot more time designing exams than I do prepping for class.
In the life sciences you need a lot more time, I think because of the slides, particularly if you are showing data from papers. Also, I find that the more basic the course, the more prep time is required, because you need to find multiple ways of explaining basic concepts. So six hours from scratch is not unreasonable. Afterwards it depends how up-to-date you want your lecture to be in subsequent years.
It definitely depends on the discipline, and mine is closer to life sciences. Also, in my uni, we DON'T have a textbook-per-course type model, so frameworks tend to move.
We are NOT teaching 'how to do problems using standard methods' type classes, most of the time - the 'problem sections' for my stats module take a few minutes to prepare because I need to select some good problems, but I know how to do them without practising beforehand. Designing a specialised lab and preparing for it can take multiple days, on the other hand, especially when I have to make up all the student sets of materials...
I like teaching, I care about doing a decent job, and for me that means doing preparation and updating my materials - even if the basic science doesn't change, the issues of interest to students and the tools for presenting it change. Preparing for teaching is a scholarly activity and part of my job, not administrivia to be minimised. Of course I try to cut the prep hours whenever possible, the workload model is a total fiction on the much-less-measurable research side (two weeks for each published paper up to three a year. one week per graduate student - I often need to spend 2-3 weeks in the field/lab with them, never mind having supervisory meetings, reading their drafts etc.) so hours are saved anywhere they can be.
@Jane B: Two weeks per published paper?! Does this include research? I wish it were so easy!! And only a week a year per grad student? I spend way more than 40 hours a year interacting with each student. That's less than an hour a week!
At my R1 university in a top-5 ranked engineering department, faculty spend an average of 6-10 hr/wk per hr lecture prepping for a new course. I also felt that I was spending way too much time, so I did my own informal poll of other faculty, and was surprised to see how high the number was. Perhaps this is because our dean REALLY looks at our teaching evaluations. But it just takes a ton of time to come up with sample problems and design good homework problems. For an old class, average is 1-2 hr prep per hr lecture.
I'm 1st year faculty in a chemistry department at a primarily undergrad institution, teaching 2 large lecture classes and one lab. For the lecture classes I'm spending at least 5-6 hours per hour of lecture. I am barely keeping up and seldom getting ahead in lecture planning. I am hopeful that lecture prep will get faster the second time through. I wish I could find a way to make prep quicker this time around, but I just haven't found a way to do that and still feel ready for class. Since I'm at a PUI, teaching evals will count toward my tenure package -- so I don't feel I can slack off on this. At the same time, I am wondering when I will ever have time to get my research off of the ground! -AL
@ namnezia: yeah, that's what we all say. But that's what the model says our time is worth. Even more fun - NO load, i.e. no 'work', is apparently involved in going to conferences because we benefit from them, apparently. Huh??
Post a Comment