I don’t think any Bush is qualified to understand how higher education works. Jeb!s latest gaffe:
There are a lot of beautiful buildings being built on college campuses, but you can’t get a course on Friday afternoon. And a professor, tenured professor, may not be teaching many more courses than one per semester.
Those lazy liberal elites! Except that he’s all wrong.
Some professors do teach one course, or even less, per semester. But those faculty have instead exchanged teaching responsibilities for greater research, lab management, and grant-writing responsibilities. Many universities allow you to buy out of teaching obligations with grant funds, but that isn’t escaping any work at all.
Anybody who knows anything about how universities work would know that what matters in the accounting is contact hours — I’m supposed to have a certain number of hours working with students directly every week, in class or in lab. It doesn’t matter when those hours happen, although we try to distribute them to meet student demand. We teaching faculty, in the hours we aren’t engaged with students, are tied up in lecture prep, grading, etc. (also, office hours don’t count as contact hours). If I get a lighter class load on Friday, it means I’ve got a heavier load other days of the week.
My current load is: two 65 minute lectures on Monday and Wednesday, three 50 minute lectures on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and two 3 hour labs on Tuesday and Thursday. I also work with our senior seminar students, which is an additional two hours a week. All those classes require additional hours of prep, and fluctuating amounts of work on grading. The lab requires lots of set up time — I started setting up fly crosses back in December. I was doing prep work on Christmas.
This is also work that gives many people the heebie-jeebies — public speaking? Seven times a week? That would horrify a great many Americans. One of the few jobs that probably requires more public speaking is politician, but there’s a difference between that and professorial work. We’re required to know what we’re talking about, and be accurate.
I know you like catchy post titles, PZ, but the unfortunate (literal) implication is that, until this event, Jeb had not lost your vote.
(I know, I am not helpful)
Should it surprise any of us that he’s trying to appeal to aggrieved idiots by reinforcing stupid stereotypes
I teach high school. (My spouse is an admin at a govt. agency, and practically freaks out when she is expected to “run a meeting.”) So, this amuses me, because I run several “meetings” each day, and everyone who attends my meetings must be able to demonstrate that their knowledge base was functionally changed by it.
And I do not have a secretary, aides, or speech writers working for me, Mr Bush.
(Also, I must develop and score all my own metrics, which is no small task)
Good thing I earn so much!
As an ex-academic, Jeb would have lost my vote, but he never had it, or will have it.
Did Jeb ever stop to think (*snicker*) that the students don’t like Friday afternoon classes?
God damn but I hate that characterization. Yeah, we “only” teach 12-15 hours a week. There’s also class prep, test prep, test grading, assignment writing, assignment grading, assessment on the whole bloody course, assessment on the program, governance committee meetings, department meetings, student advising, student tutoring, class scheduling, adjunct supervision, more assessment, more meetings, dreaming about research every now and then…
Sure, it’s a great thing to have some flexible time. If my kids need me at any point of the day, as long as it’s not during my own class I can drop things and go there. BUT the tradeoff is that I’m still working at nights and on weekends. When people grouse about how “little” teachers and professors work, those are almost always people who have never brought a single bit of work home with them in their lives. Their jobs stop at 5 on the dot every damned day.
While I guess I’m not the best at memory things, I’m almost absolutely certain I’ve had classes on friday afternoons before. Is that not a thing?
Folks on the right don’t like it when I tell them when I left academia for industry, my pay went up 50%, and my hours dropped 30%. Implying that I am now lazier and better paid than when I was an academic. That just seems to mess up their ideas of the world, and the looks of unbelief are amazing.
Hey, you can’t fool Jeb! Jeb! personally knows Dan Quayle, and if Danny can profess, anybody can!
Vivec@6: yeh, I have no idea what the Friday afternoon thing is about. I had plenty of MWF classes, and by choice they were mostly afternoon until I got a bit older and started waking up before noon.
This. Teachers have to know their stuff. Their lectures can’t be composed of talking points drawn up by an assistant and they can’t bullshit their way out of direct questions. In other words, pretty much the antithesis of how politics work.
“heebie-jeebies”? Um…
I’m old enough that I both had, and have taught, Saturday morning college classes.
In my experience, the reason some Friday classes aren’t offered is because when they are, students opt not to take them and the enrollment is too low for them to run. So, not like students are clamoring for Friday afternoon classes that the mean old faculty just won’t let them take.
And a lot of the classes that do run on Friday are labs, so everyone is, you know, IN LAB for several hours straight instead of wandering around the campus so Jeb! can see them when he walks by.
Am I the only one who hates exclamation points used outside of written dialogue?
I don’t know how Friday classes are avoided. The majority of offerings are 3-credit MWF (1 hr) or TTh (1.5 hr) classes. On top of this, there is generally a shortage of classrooms, so department chairs are allocated classes per time slots to fill (and not exceed). They cannot willy-nilly say that they will not offer courses at certain times, because classrooms are a very limited resource. And 1.5 hr classes on MW are rare, because, when intermingled with a MWF 1hr norm, they take up classrooms for two time slots. Any MWF will, almost without exception, be scheduled at the same time on M&W as it is on F. To first order, to have no classes on Friday afternoon means you will have no classes on M&W afternoon. It’s not happening.
@13 – Hot dog! We have a wiener!
It’s just the invisible hand of the marketplace, that darling of the right except when it interferes with what they want. Students don’t want to take a class at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon. So fewer sign up, which makes the class less economically efficient, which makes the school less likely to offer them, which means fewer opportunities to take a class on Friday at 5, which means fewer good classes for students to take, which circles back around.
Couldn’t help but think of all of Tom Tomorrow’s Invisble Hand comics here.
I had a graduate seminar from 9-12 on Saturday. Did I want to go? No. Did I go? Yes. It was in my area of study (which was not what the school was known for or its emphasis) and it was the only time the class was offered. The only faculty that taught it had just died a month before classes, so they had to scramble for a substitute, and he normally taught at a different school 40 minutes away.
Carlie @ 13
All too true. My first year stats course was at 6 on Friday evenings. First lecture the campus’s largest lecture hall was full, the second lecture there were maybe 30 people…I couldn’t tell you what attendance was like after that.
Very few people have the faintest idea of what a university lecturer, heck even a university graduate student, does.
Most people’s experience of education has framed by formal classes, set hours, and so on, often even at university. So when they see PZ only has a few hours of class time (≈9.6hr) in a week it is obvious that he is not working very hard.
They don’t even realise that things like thesis supervision, research, and admin exist for a professor since they probably get their idea of what a professor does from movies (Disney?).
And, come to think of it, I am sure they have no conception of the time and effort that goes into research. How could they? Most people’s idea of research is a google search.
And getting a project pass the Research Ethics Board? What?
A housemate of mine in graduate school had her parents visiting and kept saying that they did not want to keep her from classes … . She had not had a formal class in a year but had trouble convincing them that she was spending all her time on research and at that stage could schedule time very flexibly. And they were both teachers.
I think teachers have the a similar problem. Few people seem to comprehend the prep/planning/marking time required. Again they only see the face time.
I started setting up fly crosses back in December
That’s a long lead time for Easter, well Good Friday, I guess. Just how many flies are you and your students planning to crucify?
This has not been my experience. Classes being undersubscribed is a relatively rare problem. Classes being full is the much bigger problem. Besides it would only apply to free electives. If, as a chair, I schedule a required class on Friday afternoon, I guarantee that students will sign up. They might complain, like they do for 8:00 am classes, but they will not cut off their nose to spite their face.
I’ll also note that every school I’ve ever encountered had a means whereby, if a student actually desperately needed a course that was not offered at a time they could take it, said student could usually arrange for an Independent Study option that would fulfill the same requirement (and, incidentally, require additional outside-the-class support from a professor who cared more about their students than about taking the afternoon off). This option isn’t heavily advertised, for obvious reasons, but I never saw a student in need who didn’t eventually learn about it after some time pressing the bursar’s office for a solution.
@21
I’ve certainly never heard about it, although I wouldn’t be surprised if that information was purposefully withheld.
Where I go, the answer to “I can’t get into prerequirements for my Major because there’s too few seats” is “Suck it up and be a 5-6 year graduate rather than a 4 year one.”
Depends on the student body makeup. At schools that have a lot of commuter/part-time/nontraditional students, the choice between getting that class in now v. getting less work hours (and pay) or losing their job entirely is not one that always has the same answer.
@6: I had a Friday afternoon class last summer AND remembered why I tried to avoid them. Colleges and universities have to efficiently allocate resources. If very few students sign up for Friday pm classes, why offer them?
We have plenty of Friday classes. But get real: if it’s a class offered two days a week, it’s going to be MW or TTh. In those cases, a MF class would just be the worst option for attendance. Three days a week? It’s going to be a MWF class.
My genetics class is MW because it’s a 4 credit course with a 3 hour lab, so I can only have two lectures/week to fit into the course load rules. I could go to a MWF schedule with 3 lectures and a 3 hour lab, but then it would be a 5 credit course…and students are supposed to manage their allocation of time efficiently, and dedicating a third of your 15 credit load to one elective is considered unwise.
My university is on the quarter system, so our 4 credit hour classes tend to avoid Fridays. OTOH, this quarter I spend 7 hours in front of students on Fridays. (Out of a 10-11-hour day)
@Bill Buckner #20
That would not have been true at the university I went to[1], in part because UWaterloo _didn’t_ schedule the courses then let the students sign up. Instead, you preregistered for courses and then the schedule was generated so as to minimize conflicts[2]. One constraint applied to the system was to avoid Friday afternoon and evening classes if possible. Friday afternoons thus tended to be tutorials[3]/seminars, (smaller groups), labs, (smaller groups, very limited space) and electives and Friday evening was literally ‘we couldn’t fit it anywhere else.’
[1] I’m in Ontario: Universities also do the undergrad degrees.
[2] The system wasn’t quite perfect. One term had about half the chemistry students stuck with a solid five-hour block of lectures MWF. Thankfully, the prof for the 1130 class had no issues with people eating in her lectures.
[3] In the science, engineering and math programs these were not optional. In fact they were less skippable than the lectures because quizzes were very common.
Rick Pikul,
Nice. I would love to have that sort of system, with a genetic algorithm or simulated annealing optimizing the schedule. The way we do it is archaic. As a department chair, I can avoid conflicts in my own department, but it is very difficult to avoid conflicts across departments. A few years ago the Math department moved a sophomore multivariable calculus class that we (physics) require, and they moved it to the same time period where we had scheduled a required course for sophomores. This type of conflict is almost undetectable until the schedules come out–and its the students who detect the problems.
My son’s schedule this semester has two MWF morning 1-hour classes, one TTh morning 1.5 hour … and one MW afternoon 1.5 hour. Definitely happens.
God, I would love an automated system that suggested a best schedule based on what our students need. The hours and hours of arranging and horse-trading across departments around when things are offered are immense.
@Bill Buckner
Personally, it has long surprised me that most schools aren’t using a preregistration system. It’s not like it’s exactly a new thing, It wasn’t even new when I started going to UWaterloo in 1992.