Back in the fall of 2010, when it looked like members of UWOFA might be going on strike, there was occasionally some muttering about “those lazy profs who only work 3 hours a week”. It’s true that our actual classroom time is small compared to elementary or high school teachers, so what does a prof do with the other hours in the week?

Most professors at Western have their workloads divided between teaching, research and service. The balance varies, but the standard is 40% of time to research, 40% to teaching and 20% to service. So that tells you where some of the non-classroom time is going — to things completely other than teaching.

But how about the other non-classroom-but-teaching hours? From my perspective, some of those hours are spent doing the same things other teachers do:  preparing class activities (including lectures), preparing and marking assignments and tests, and dealing with a gradebook. I write letters of recommendation for students and meet with them in my office to talk about coursework or (espeically in the case of graduate students) their research. I go to conferences and workshops which are supposed to help me be a better teacher.

There are some things that elementary and high school teachers do which are not part of my job. I don’t have yard duty at recess, and, except in rare cases, I don’t talk to the parents of my students. However, I also do some things that elementary or high school teachers don’t do. (Let me be clear that I don’t think their jobs are easier than mine, just different!)

Some of these tasks are related to the size of our classes: for instance, this term I have one class with 100 students and one with 200; I’m course coordinator of two courses which means that I have some organizational responsibility for about 900 students total. With large classes, we have teaching assistants to help with things like tutorials and marking, and organizing those TAs is a non-trivial task. With that many students, administrating them — for example, arranging make-up exams for students who missed a midterm — also takes time. I have to make up many-page course outlines which spell out the details of my courses, such as what happens if a student misses a midterm. And a sad fact of life is that I have to spend time on anti-cheating measures, for example making multiple versions of exams.

The other category of teaching tasks that I think is different for profs is related to our greater freedom to decide what and how we want to teach. For elementary and high school students in Ontario, the province sets the curriculum. We have the Western course Calendar which doesn’t exactly go into the same level of detail. So I spend a fair bit of time thinking about what I want my students to learn, and why. For, say, first-year physics, this course content is driven to a large extent by the upper-level courses which these students will go on to take. But for a graduate course, or an astronomy-for-non-scientists course,  there’s not such a clear set of requirements.

This means that I spend time looking around for examples of similar courses, looking at textbooks to see which ones might be most suitable, and talking to other profs about what they want students to learn from this course. Then once I figure out where I want students to go, I have to figure out how I can help them to get there. Again, I spend some time looking around, trying to figure out what educational methods are best suited for the type of course and students that I have. If I give complicated assignments, I try to do them myself to make sure they’re feasible. If I’m going to use some new technology, I have to make sure that I can make it work.

My prof colleagues who are reading this now know exactly how lazy I am (or not). For students who read this all the way down, I hope it gives you a bit of a behind-the-scenes look at what I am doing when we’re not in the classroom together. In a future post I’ll discuss some of what the other 60% of my time involves.