Contact Hours
For those of you teaching, how many contact hours per week do you have? How many office hours are required? Just curious...
20 Years of Themes, and still going
2 months ago
For those of you teaching, how many contact hours per week do you have? How many office hours are required? Just curious...
Posted by
Erin
at
7:40 PM
10 comments:
I teach 3 classes a semester (we need to average 18 hours/year) and need to have 3-5 office hours a semester.
We can hold "extra hours" for ~2 years.
We teach 12 student credit hours a semester. If I was in history, that would be four 3-hour classes. In biology, that usually means 3 3-hour lectures and 3 different 3 hour labs, so 18 contact hours per week (22 or so hours in land resources where all of the classes are 3 hours-- 2 of lecture and 1 credit [3 hours] of lab).
We're required to have 10 hours of office hours on top of that and to have a five day a week presence on cammpus.
SS - wow. We're not required to be on campus everyday partly due to facilities - most of us need to do research off campus. But we also have a large administrative and service load. I'm now feeling guilty that I felt like I had a heavy teaching load. To be fair- we were 4:4 when I was hired, but we got a teaching load reduction to help up our professional develeopment.
We have effectively no research requirement (despite it being officially 20% of our job). If I ever want another job, I need to get some things published, but what I do now (having students present at academy of sciences, training high school teachers over the summer, presenting myself at a national meeting . . . ) should put me in good stead to keep my job.
A 12 hour load is not unusual at a small state college. Our time in the lab might be, and my teaching 11 different preps plus 8 differnt labs in two years was crazy even for here.
Our administration came down with a mandate to have us teach 21 student credits annually, down from 24. Most of the non-lab classes (mostly humanities and social sciences) are 3 credits and are 3 weekly contact hours. Most of our science classes have labs and are 4 credits but 6 weekly contact hours. We in the sciences have been researching other small schools and pushing our own admin to recognize the discrepancy here, not to mention the additional hours of lab set-up and take-down.
To answer your question more directly, this spring I am teaching 2 different lab classes, each 4 credits and 6 contact hours, along with 2 credits' worth of senior research advising. It's very hard to quantify the contact hours involved with advising this research. Some weeks I do very little and some week I put in many hours.
Oh, and we're supposed to hold something like 3 office hours weekly per class, but since my office hours are almost never attended and I'm unsure of any means for enforcing the rumored requirement, I have indicated 3:00-3:45pm as my scheduled hours, with "by appointment" as a perennial alternative on my syllabus. Even though I'm "only" teaching two courses this spring, they run 10-12 and 1-3 on MWF. I am reserving 12-1 for breast pumping and feeding myself (lest I actually need to set up for my 1pm class) and 8:30-10:00 for general office stuff and course prep. I relish the thought of getting to day care by 4pm.
In case anyone is doing the math, I should point out that the botanist at Doane and I unofficially team-teach the lectures for a 4cr class and then hold our labs individually. So, for this class I'm at least sitting, if not lecturing, 10-12 MWF and then doing a Th afternoon lab for 3 hours. My other course is just me 1-3 on MWF with lectures and labs combined. Luckily, I have Tuesdays FREE to be at home with Zoey and Osa and can at least get a later start on Thursdays, although faculty meetings often happen at 11 those days.
Babbling over.
I have a lab
Third post's the charm. I have no idea why that last post ends with "I have a lab".
We also are expected to advise independent research projects. That doesn't count for much of anything, although we have negotiated a small sum of extra pay for it ($50 per student credit hour, majors are required to take 3 hours worth, usually divided up between two semesters). Some of my students are very independent. Some are not. I don't do any actual lab work with them, but my colleagues do.
Heather and Beth - do you have a research requirement? If so, what's the percentage?
We don't have set percentages - but teaching/service/professional development are given equal rank on our tenure doc. So I guess ~33% which means for us we need to go to conferences, present, and also to publish (either science or education) in peer-reviewed journals. Number of pubs has varied for sucessful applicants (for tenure) from 1 - 5 so we have a bit of a range.
On a side note - we have a one-year teaching position open for next year in biology if anyone wants to be in Chicago.
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