Re: teaching loads and quality

[Larry Smith <Larry.Smith@SNOW.EDU>]

At 11:05 PM -0400 10/1/01, Joe Heafner wrote:
> I'd be interested in knowing what the teaching loads are among list
> members. At my institution, the official load is 18-21 contact hrs per
> week, but our administrators force us to carry the high end of that range.
> We're supposedly docked in pay if we drop below 54 hrs over three
> semesters (i'm on 12 months). The other physics instructor at my school is
> also our division chairperson, and his load is only 10 contact hrs per
> week.


We are expected to teach 15-16 credit hours (which means more than that
contact hours counting labs) per semester, plus the usual advising load and
committee assignments.  We prep our own labs.  We do have graders.

Some small allowances are made for workload credit for department chair,
maintaining computer labs, etc. (the division dean gets a much larger
allowance for being dean on his workload calculation, plus he gets 3% pay
raise).  I currently make about $44k for a 9-month contract (with PhD and
10 years experience).

Since I'm department chair I try very hard to keep the class size down and
the workloads toward the bottom of the expected range.

I think I'd die without (at least parts of the) summers off if I were
teaching that much 12 months per year.  I usually teach one summer session
for extra pay and the recuperate for the rest of the summer.

Larry

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Larry K. Smith         voice: (435) 283-7520  | Not everything that counts
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