The Pissed Off Professor

New books—new pens—new lunch packs—new folders: ah, the start of a new semester. (These are my new things: I wonder what new things my students will have?)

California has a budget—that makes things a bit easier, but the shuffle, bustle, and confusion of the first and second class meetings are always a challenge.

This semester, we’ve changed to a sixteen-week schedule—down from eighteen weeks in the past. In addition, most classes meet only twice each week. (Until this change, classes were traditionally M-W-F or Tu-Th.)

The sixteen weeks, two-days-per-week schedule is supposed to be a better fit all around: students prefer two-days-per-week classes (as do many instructors), and as impacted as the district is, more classes can now be crammed into the same amount of space.

Fridays are now free to hold one-day-per week classes, and like Saturday courses, these are very popular with working adults—not educationally beneficial in most cases, but popular.

The fewer weeks and days also means class meetings have been extended. Previously, M-W-F courses were 50 minutes in length, and Tu-Th classes were 75 minutes in length. Now, courses are 80 minutes long.

As a teacher, I love this: 50 minutes is far too short to do much good. By the time one takes roll, 5 minutes are gone; wrapping up is another 5 minutes, and that leaves only 40 minutes of class time. It’s tough to cover two things well in that amount of time: especially if one of the things is a reading discussion, but it’s a bit too long to use for just one thing. 75 minutes is better: once the 10 minutes of fluff are excised, it leaves just over an hour of class time.

80 minutes means I have those brains for an hour and ten minutes of scholarship: wow—now that is teaching time.

Of course, one of the things I’ve begun to notice when teaching the 75 minute classes is the issue of failing attention spans: students simply can’t sit still and/or focus for more than about 30 minutes of time. Now, I have to figure out a way to get them to stay with me for longer than ever.

I use all of the teaching tricks: breaking things into smaller units of activity, participation versus lecture, calling on people, etc. These are Band-Aids: the clock watching will inevitably begin after the first 20 minutes has passed, and in most modern classrooms (on my campus, anyway), the clocks almost always face the students not the teachers.

If only I were a hottie.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Adminstration, College, Education, Politics, Students, Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.