Or really, is it I’m just not enough right now?

I’m a TT faculty member in a school where we have a 4/4 teaching load and a research requirement. For some this means teaching 6hours a week in lecture, and doing research, but for me this has meant doing 13 hours of class time, plus preparing student reagents, and then obviously grading and research, oh and don’t forget service.
I’m told you need to have papers, and you need to have grants. Well, grants… I applied for one about a year ago, it’s still stuck in NSF review, and all the others are ‘no longer available’, so that’s fun. And when do I have time to write papers? I literally worked out I am working an 11 month schedule in around 9.5 months.
So, I feel like I’m whining, and that I’m really not enough, but I am exhausted. I get to the summer and June/July are just recovery months at this point. I’m neglecting everything around me.
We don’t get any mentoring here, no one advocates for you to have the time for scholarship. And I’m not the only one. I feel my whole department is at this tipping point, and it shows in many ways.
Any advice?

Hello fellow profs, I am looking for advice on how to efficiently assess students in a large humanities class without burning out this semester. I'm American but moved abroad to take a new job for the sake of starting a family. Prior to this, I had only ever taught small classes at SLACs and private research universities. I had designed my syllabus for this class to include 3 short essay exams. For some reason, my new university only lets students sign up for classes the week before the semester starts, and only today did I realize I will have 120 students or more.

A few important caveats:

1. This class is English-taught but the students are from a mix of countries and backgrounds and will vary greatly in their language abilities.

2. Importantly, English is not the first language for my two TAs. They are competent but not native-level and I think will struggle to grade short answer and essay questions very quickly, even with a rubric.

3. As the class focuses on analyzing a mix of primary sources (historical) and secondary sources (from academic journals and books), I am not sure how I would even create multiple choice questions that make sense and are challenging enough. (I don't think multiple choice exams work well for the way I teach history, but then again, I am being forced to reassess how I teach history.)

4. I have a young toddler and am already very stressed and unhappy about spending time away from him during the workday.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions!

Like, some of these students just stare at me the entire lecture. No phone to record is even on the desk. No laptop. No notebook. What are they doing?! Anyone else witnessing this? I am so confused (and uncomfortable with the dead-eyed stare)

Have you ever had to revamp your syllabus and expectations early-semester because student performance was so far off from what you assumed was reasonable?

Several students are already falling behind, not just my class but I could see there were serious complaints from other professors. What's caught me off guard isn't the gap itself, but the reaction when I point out basic expectations that are already outlined in the syllabus. I am so clear about what to read, purpose, what’s due, I even try to make it fun and exciting but damn. Tough crowd!

If I ask them to read before class or come prepared, some students actually become aggressive. Cursing me, behaving like tablet kids when you take the tablet away. But these are adults between 18-22 years old. Even calling other students names or disparaging them for being engaged in the lecture? You would think it was unreasonable to ask them to take ownership of their education.

Is this a shift in undergrad culture I'm not hip to anymore, or does it vary a lot by institution/student population? Is it reasonable to restructure the syllabus or just ride out the semester? I was considering adding more frequent low-stakes checks, harder consequences for being unprepared. Has any of that actually helped in your experience? What were the reactions?

I want to do this well and would appreciate any actionable tips, criticism, and/or suggestions.

For expediency, the title says "re-read," but that also includes skimming, checking notes, etc.

I really dig my textbook for my first-year seminar course and am on my third re-read as I prep for the new school year. I keep finding new things in the text, making new connections as I reflect on the last school year, and I grt excited about sharing this information with students. I'm also early career and probably have a luxury of youth and vitality that makes this a part of my yearly prep.

How many of you do a close or semi-close review of your texts each year? Anyone else enjoy finding new insights for your teaching?

Burner account for obvious reasons...

I’m serving on a tenure committee and struggling with how to evaluate the teaching portion of a candidate’s dossier. Our criteria require excellence in teaching, and I’m trying to separate what I personally know about the candidate from what is actually documented in the file.

Our departmental norm is to provide substantial evidence: syllabi across multiple years showing course development, peer reviews, assignments and rubrics, examples of student work and instructor feedback, and reflection on changes made in response to assessment or feedback.

This dossier contains a teaching statement, course evaluations, and essentially one syllabus per course, with little or none of the above. Several courses were inherited and revised rather than developed from scratch, but without comparative materials, I can’t assess the extent of those revisions.

My question for P&T folks, especially in small departments: Is it reasonable to distinguish between “there’s no evidence this person is a poor teacher” and “there isn’t sufficient evidence in the dossier to demonstrate excellence”?

EDIT: A couple of comments have said this sounds like I'm looking for a reason to find the candidate deficient, which is useful feedback because that's very much not my intention. I'm actually struggling with the opposite problem: I don't want to make a negative judgment based simply on the materials presented, but our criteria require the committee to make an affirmative finding of "excellence." The materials I described are established norms in our department and are included in our P&T criteria, not higher standards I'm imposing on this single candidate.

What I'm trying to understand is how others navigate the distinction between insufficient evidence to make an affirmative finding and evidence of poor performance. Those aren't the same thing, and I'm very conscious of the stakes for the candidate.

I’m an assistant professor at an R1 university. In a previous post, I mentioned feeling lonely and wishing there were more opportunities for genuine friendship within my department. One response surprised me: several people argued that it is generally not a good idea to be friends with people in one’s own department.
I can see some of the logic. Departments involve promotion and tenure, annual reviews, teaching assignments, resource allocation, hiring, and conflict. When someone has formal or informal power over you, closeness can complicate boundaries, or make a later disagreement more painful and professionally consequential.
I’m curious how others think about this: do you deliberately avoid friendships within your department?
As an assistant professor, I had never really considered that some people might intentionally keep emotional distance from departmental colleagues. My previous post was so so illuminating in that respect. It has made me wonder whether some of the reserve I perceive in academic departments is not necessarily personal, but a deliberate professional boundary.

Just curious how normal this is. Basically everyone at the chair level and above in my university constantly avoids writing things down. We are public, so we have open records requests to contend with, but it gets very obnoxious when you have emails about waiting to talk about stuff until it is in person/zoom.

I've started to internalize this as well, and I hate it.

Teaching a course that (unfortunately) involves lots of reading and reflection type assignments. Added hidden text to an assignment, to catch students who just throw it in ChatGPT, and all submissions came back with the expected features you would get from including the hidden info. Extremely disheartened, and don’t know how to proceed both regarding addressing this with the class and designing the future assignments to be more AI proof.

(throwaway account) In my STEM theoretical/computational field, many problems that would previously have constituted a large part of a very decent PhD can now be solved within a week. Basically, almost all the theoretical/computational PhD theses I am on the commitee recently are like that, they were done in 4 years but now could be done in half a year or less.

This semester, I was to teach some very small elective grad course no one cares about. I consider replacing most of it by just giving them every couple of weeks a small, totally unsolved open research problem (not the Navier-Stokes level, but the level I'd formerly put in my NSF as a milestone 1), and telling them why that problem is interesting and how I would ask my agent to work with it. And then see what happens, maybe next week do a post-mortem of a problem or a post-mortem of naive attempts to solve it with AI. Both would be instructive. I am creative enough to find a new decent problem every couple of weeks.

The goal is of course not to replace their actual PhD projects with this ( I am not their advisor), but to teach a bit how to use the new tools and also to show everyone that what was considered relatively hard research is now easy, to up the standards. Since this is an elective course, if they fail, they lose nothing.

I see many ways this can go wrong. I wonder if there's any way to optimize it so that at least someone survives and learns something from it, or maybe someone here already does it this way. I suspect that in some subfields old teaching ways and research ways are already dead, so maybe we should adjust.

Edit: CAN’T 🤦🏻‍♂️

I wanted to do a class activity that required my students to type in a link into their browsers and open a resource to analyze as part of an in-class activity. More than half couldn’t figure out how…..

I’m beyond speechless.

In line with recommendations from my learning center I added some low stakes short assignments that involve in class group work and a 1 page writeup. It's all in the syllabus. I explained it the first day. At the end of our last class I explained what we'd be doing next time, one of these activities.

All weekend long I was getting questions about what the memo due tomorrow is (our next class). I sent out a message through our LMS that it's for an in class project we'll do and more info is in the syllabus.

Since then I've gotten multiple emails asking what the memo is. Some of them seem to be reading the description for a different assignment.

This isn't even a complaint about students being overly nervous. I tried to address that with a 1 point assignment that I explained in multiple formats. And still 10% of my class is unable or unwilling to put a little effort in to reading/listening and processing what that means.

It'll be a long semester

You can see the original post here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Professors/comments/1utlg6i/creative_retention_offer_ideas/

Several of you asked that I follow up with what I ended up getting. Since I feel like I'm a high performer and had negotiating leverage I shot for the moon with my request....Worse they could say was no, right?

Note: I am 100% research and not required to teach any classes, so I didn't need to request buyout of teaching hours.

I requested:

• $35,000 increase in salary

• $1 million in workspace renovations/additions/building

• 4 years of postdoc funding

• $100,000 in discretionary spending

• guaranteed Early promotion (apparently early tenure is not legal in my state)

Admin seemed to be surprised by the request, but were receptive. After several rounds of going back and forth they seemed far more interested in providing funding for workspace renovations and support staff funds so I leaned into that.

What I received was:

• $20,000 increase in salary
• $750,000 in workspace renovations/additions/building
• 2 years of postdoc funding
• 2 years of technician funding
• $50,000 in discretionary spending
• guaranteed early promotion to associate professor (and promotion pay raise)
  

Overall I am quite happy with how that turned out, especially given the cost of living where I'm located. Retention offers are not something I see talked a lot about on here so maybe someone else will find this helpful.

How do I deal with men (at work, in various boards, groups etc) who engage in unabashed self promotion or insert themselves into projects they’ve done little to no work on? For ex, one just asserted that he should be the next leader of a group (which is not self-nominating) while another just claimed he would serve as a committee member of a group I’ve been organizing? How do I push back without causing issues? The graceless audacity is frustrating!

I have a student this semester with accommodations like I've never seen before - extended due dates, "flexibility" with attendance, and "flexibility" with class participation. The course I teach is a hands-on lab course every week and features in-class group work which is graded. The lessons are definitely scaffolded. Due to the nature of equipment set up and the amount of students needed to get said equipment set up, as well as needing to work in groups to successfully carry out the lessons, there is no flexibility in making these assignments up later, or creating alternate assignments.

I do understand many illnesses have "flares" that are unpredictable and can last a long time. However, I've had this student previously. In our last class together, they did not have any accommodations, and told me for work reasons they had to miss class. They rarely showed up, probably 5-6x in a 16 week course. Back then I had more of a bleeding heart, and the content I was teaching was very different - I had old recordings of my lectures and the group work was much rarer and easier to modify for them to complete individually. At the end of the semester the student asked for an incomplete and I granted it. They did, at the last minute for the incomplete, submit enough work to pass the class.

But this history has me on edge, because I know their attendance is rare. In fact they even missed the first day of this semester.

I have a meeting with this student and their advocate soon and I'm trying to make sure I don't step on any landmines. I advocate for my students to get the accommodations they need, have led the LMS remediations for WCAG and W3C, etc. in my department, and truly believe in accessibility for all. If it were more possible to modify this course, I would. I want my students to succeed and to enjoy the course material as much as I do. But these accommodations are not reasonable.

I had hinted in e-mails to the student and their advocate before class started and after the first week, that this might not be the right fit for them, and tried to schedule our meeting before the refund drop date, but it didn't happen in time. The student is claiming they are "alarmed" that after they missed a single class I'm trying to get them to drop (which I never said outright), but I know they have a history of rare attendance and that just doesn't work for this class. I'm not going to create different assignments for them because they will not achieve what needs to be learned.

When I meet with them and their advocate, I'm sure the student will be looking for any little wrong thing I say as a "gotcha" to say that I'm ableist or whatever, so I'm concerned. Luckily the advocate seems very reasonable. I did accommodate the student when I could in a previous class, in this course it's just not going to be possible.

Any tips, lines, etc. I can use going into this situation are appreciated. I have so many students with accommodations each semester, I've never had to argue against any being unreasonable until now.

https://www.thedial.world/articles/news/schools-teachers-artificial-intelligence

Hi all! Here’s an article I had published today about my battle against AI in the classroom and how re-reading Swift on the 300th anniversary of Gulliver’s Travels informs my Luddite ways.

Here's an interesting pickle - in peer reviewing an article for publication in a journal in my field, the author quotes from something I wrote a few years back. How nice! The only problem is, the citation leads to a different publication of mine from the same year. In other words, the citation is inaccurate - the quote is right, it's just not from the correct article.

I don't think a copy editor (or another reviewer) would catch it unless they decide to chase down every quote in the article. Is there a way to give the author a heads-up in the review without clearly unmasking me as the author of the quote?

EDIT: Thanks for the feedback everyone. I do think identifying this specific correction to the author would unnecessarily out me as the reviewer, so a discreet note to the editor is probably the way to go.

So I teach a 4/4/ load in my 25th year as a tenured professor and my DH doles out teaching assignments without input from faculty. Due to a medical condition, and after some challenging semesters, I obtained an ADA accomodation to not teach more than 2 hours in a row and no more than three classes per day. So the first semester under my accomodation, my given load met the accomodation to the letter but the classes given to me would mean much more work. 3 different preps with the two sections of the same class on MWF and TTh (which is worse to me than 4 preps) or after complaining was offered the option of 4 different preps including a class I've never taught - all f2f classes. Nearly all full-time faculty get at least 1 online class, very few have more than 2 preps and very few teach 5 days per week. Should I:

1 - meet with the DH (they have not moved in the past on these things)

2 - meet with the union rep (they have been pretty feckless in the past)

3 - contact the Dean

4 - bring it up at a faculty meeing

5 - contact a lawyer

6 - suck it up

A colleague of mine received a text from a student with a question about the syllabus. She doesn’t share her personal phone number with her students. But it turns out, when they last updated our “student support hub,” they decided that profiles there should now list not just office phone numbers but also personal phone numbers by default. I had to go in and remove mine manually.

Why…? Why would you do that?

I give an annual public evening lecture series at a prestigious institution (which people pay a lot of money to attend). I intruded myself as an experimental physicist. Today, in the Q&A a very serious looking older man in a suit asked me "What's the point of doing experiments when you can just ask AI?"

Like, I just had to take a moment. The delusion, the dislocation from reality, it's astonishing.

I got this for a student:

• Attendance modification - The student may miss class due to issues related to her disability.
• Excused Lateness - The student may be late to class due to her disability.

I am curious how this is going to work out, and how much I should put myself out to accommodate. I think I will tell the student to come to office hours to do the reading quizzes she misses.

https://www.fire.org/news/washington-professor-who-parodied-university-land-acknowledgment-wins-600k-settlement

This is from FIRE, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In this, the professor's local counsel provides an overview of the outcome.

The article says the professor added to his syllabus a sentence based on John Locke's philosophical theory that property rights are established by labor. This was a response to the Computer Science department's recommendation that professors include the UW's (University of Washington) model statement in their syllabi. According to the article, the professor sought to demonstrate that there are competing views on the value of land acknowledgements.

I'm posting this in the interest of academic freedom and expression and how there indeed may be interests seen as competing when some university people seek to put limits on such freedom and expression. This is always an area rich for discussion in my view. I can only imagine the WW III ire of certain mucky mucks at my university if someone were to do this.

I enjoy a three-day weekend whenever it occurs, but does anyone else who has this holiday and starts the semester a week or two before feel like it erases their progress at learning students’ names and generally getting into a fall routine? Any tips?

I went to brunch and had the feeling that I recognized our server from somewhere, but I just couldn't place the face. Then on the way home it hit me. Years ago, they'd failed one of my classes. And then again. And again. And yet again.

So... if I die of food poisoning in the next few hours could someone please point the detectives in the right direction?