ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 15, 1997 TAG: 9703170024
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID BURR
IN HIS FEB. 23 letter to the editor (``Let's analyze rising college costs''), Virgil E. Verheyden called for an independent task force of business people to study how professors spend their time. It's a reasonable idea, and I would be happy to cooperate.
Meanwhile, let me explain to him and others what I do for a living. I'll use last semester as a model because it has the virtue of being over, yet recent enough to be clear in my mind.
I taught one section of Medieval History with 40 students and two sections of Historical Methods with 25 students each, a total of nine classroom hours per week and 90 students. The standard rule of thumb is that each hour in class should take two hours of preparation. That's a reasonable estimate for someone who has taught for a long time, if we include only what happens once the semester begins.
Last semester was unusual because I placed both sections of Methods on the Internet for the first time. The syllabus and all the reading were made available on the Web. By the end of the semester, a high percentage of students were submitting their papers by e-mail. This involved more than eight hours of preparation per week, but let's call it eight for argument's sake.
My preparation time was spent largely on the Methods sections, which were set up to cover a new topic each week. On the first day, two students did a general presentation of the topic; then on the next, there was a general discussion of the reading for that week. My time was spent working with the presenters; doing the reading, which has to be reviewed every year even though I've read most of it before; and staring at the computer screen asking myself what had gone wrong.
This estimate doesn't include preparation done during the summer. For example, I've spent part of the past two summers doing the basic computer work involved in putting courses on the Web and producing my own translations of various medieval works so that I can make them available on the Web without copyright infringement.
A paper roughly three pages long was due every week in Methods and roughly every 10 days in Medieval History. That seems to imply more than 70 papers each week, but it's a bit more complicated than that. In reality, I graded only around 55 each week. I normally make grammatical, spelling and various stylistic corrections on each paper. Then I attach a typed statement reacting to what the student said. These statements are sometimes as short as four or five lines, but they're occasionally longer than the paper itself. The goal is to let students know I'm taking their arguments seriously. The whole process takes me around 20 minutes per paper, approximately 18 hours per week.
And then there are the committee meetings and administrivia. I do as little as possible, but it's impossible to get away with less than four hours each week - and most people do a great deal more.
For those not keeping score, we now have nine hours of classes, 18 of preparation, 18 of paper-grading and four of administrivia - a grand total of 49 hours without counting research time. That should be good news to Verheyden since he believes research time shouldn't be counted. I do.
Perhaps he feels that professors out of touch with their fields do as good a job of educating students as professors active in their fields. I don't, and neither do most students and neither does the university. The formula used by my department to rate me every year assumes I'm doing research. And I am, but mostly in the summer. A certain amount of research is done during the school year, but it normally gets done in the evening or on weekends.
Verheyden may think my teaching method is idiotic or my research isn't worth doing, but these are separate issues. The issue being addressed is what my week looks like. From here, it looks like about 50 hours to 60 hours during the school year and a more leisurely but steady pace during the summer. Am I complaining? Lord no! I grew up in a family of mill workers and know what real work looks like.
I'm thrilled that they pay me for this. I'm stunned that after 30 years on the job, I can still wake up at 6:30 every morning and actually look forward to reading papers or discussing the Magna Carta with a group of intelligent students. Few people in the world enjoy their job this much. I'm just sick of hearing people like Verheyden suggest that I work nine hours a week and something should be done about me.
David Burr-is a professor of history at Virginia Tech.
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