Wednesday, April 9, 2014

What are you doing with your time?

The stereotype of faculty is often that they are so involved with research, they have little time for anything else.  Students take a second or third seat to more important issues while faculty selfishly slave away in the lab. Weekends, days not teaching and breaks are for lounging in a tan jacket with patches, feet up on the footstool, smoking a pipe and reading poetry.  Ahhhhh.h.h.h

Not so, says a study from Boise State University.  Boise State took the challenge to document faculty's time to learn how they actually spend it.  For those of us already in teaching, we are not surprised when they unveiled their findings.

First we have to look at their days.  The stereotype is correct, faculty do not work five days a week.  They work seven.   Yep, Seven (7).

They also spend much more time with teaching, planning, mentoring, including students in research, creating activities and grading than any
other task.  Boise State is a research university and it is surprising how little time faculty actually devote toward their research.

New teaching interactive teaching styles with many alternative resources take time to create and time to implement.  Class sizes continue to grow as the budgets shrink.  Learning new technology, creating electronic materials, and supplementing over priced textbooks takes time.

Read the article and weep for those of you who went into higher education to do research!

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