We met with the UO last Thursday to discuss our proposal on non-economic and economic articles. The session ended with some fireworks and I thought I'd fill you in.
One of the proposals we have been discussing with the university is our proposal that departments have a policy about the maximum number of students that can be assigned to a teaching GTF. We have made it clear that we are asking for this language because we think that some departments are giving GTFs more students than can reasonably be handled in the number of hours GTFs are assigned to work. We think that if departments have to set a policy on the number of students assigned to a GTF, then departments will be less likely to slowly raise the number of students or have one or two classes with super high enrollment.
Over the last four months, the UO has rejected our proposed language on the grounds that the maximum hours provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement provide protections against overwork. When we have suggested that departments and professors routinely expect GTFs to go over the hours limits or rely on them to violate the hours provisions in the interests of providing the undergraduates with a decent education, the UO's team expressed deep skepticism that such a thing ever happens. They suggested that if a GTF feels like he or she is going to go over their hours, they should talk with the supervisor about it. When we ask what GTFs should do if that doesn't work (because in our experience it doesn't), the UO said that GTFs should file grievances. We tried to explain why it was that GTFs feared filing grievances - retribution, the desire to avoid being labeled a troublemaker, desire to maintain harmonious relations with the professor who could be important later, the difficulty in proving overwork, etc. - but the UO's team seemingly dismissed these fears. They reiterated their deep skepticism that GTFs were ever asked to overwork - citing the UO's mission statement that asserts that undergraduate education is the UO's #1 priority, therefore making the possibility that a department would assign a GTF too many students an unlikelihood - and also reiterated that GTFs should file grievances if they have overwork complaints.
We found it shocking and surprising that the UO's bargaining team was unwilling to acknowledge that GTFs were often expected to overwork their hours. Two weeks ago, we asked your stewards to solicit anecdotes about overwork in your departments. We complied a 12 page document that detailed overwork situations at the UO. We gave this document to the UO at the table on Thursday as part of an effort to express to them that we believe that this is a serious issue and hopefully move them past their insistence that overwork by GTFs was a rare thing.
Unfortunately, their only response to the document was to ask us if we planned to give them the names of the GTFs who had overwork complaints or the names of the professors and/or classes. We said that we were not and reiterated our points about the fears GTFs feel around this issue.
The UO said that they wanted to be able to verify that these stories were true and that there were two sides to every story. The UO went into their caucus leaving it at that.
At the end of bargaining, as things were wrapping up, we tried again to get them to acknowledge that overwork by GTFs was a problem on campus, but they declined to do so. The best that they could do was to say that they would not want any GTF to overwork, but they also reasserted that we had not presented them with any evidence that any GTF has ever been asked to overwork, as they couldn't verify anything without specific names of GTFs.
We were very disappointed by the UO's response and asserted that pretty strongly. We cannot see how the UO will ever be willing to do anything about GTF overwork - and we are only asking for a very bare minimum, departments setting their own maximums - if they are unwilling to acknowledge that there is a problem and so far the UO has made it clear that they do not think overwork is an issue on this campus.
So far the UO is sticking by its assertion that the only solution to overwork on campus is to file grievances. With this in mind, we are asking all Spring term GTFs to keep careful track of their hours. If you feel that you are going over the hours total for the term,
(http://gtff.net/wiki/index.php/GTFF_CBA_2008-2010#ARTICLE_21_SALARY) let your supervisor know - you have every right to ask for a written response to your concerns - if your concerns are not meet, please contact me (dave@gtff.net) or Dan (andersen@gtff.net) to talk about solutions. The same is true if you are expected to work more than 15% of your FTE in any one week (like grading papers and a final in one week).
More bargaining information will be presented at the GMM on April 2nd and in future e-mails. You can read all proposals here: http://gtff.net/wiki/index.php/Resources#bargaining_articles
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Overwork at the UO Anecdotes Compiled by the GTFF
Overwork at the UO Anecdotes Compiled by the GTFF
I think my response might be totally useless for what you want.
Sorry to be so long winded. I don't have time to edit this down - just sending it as is.
AND I am VERY worried that these concerns might somehow filter back to my boss.
That would not be okay.
So please use anything you like from this ramble - but be very cautious to protect my boss' identity and thus my relationship with him.
I know I can count on your confidentiality.
One point to bring up at the start is -
We NEED our GTF to survive.
We do NOT piss off the professor by complaining.
We just DO what they want and bitch amongst ourselves.
The power differential here is tremendous.
There is NO WAY that I want even a HINT of this getting back to my personal professor.
I value my GTF beyond measure.
So you can see I cannot afford for him to get any hint of discontent from my direction.
Also - he is a gifted lecturer and fine human being.
When I try to let him know that he is making life inconvenient for me - he just doesn't seem to get it.
He lives in his own world and he is a very important man, for real reasons.
• I'm a GTF in a large lecture class (140 students), and I ran into a labor issue at the beginning of the quarter. I felt we were being overworked (there are several GTFs in the class), and if the work load had continued at that pace, we eventually would have run out of hours before the quarter ended. As a way to reduce labor hours, the instructor claimed we didn't have to come to lectures and we could basically not grade so thoroughly. As a result, when asked some questions from my students in regards to class assignments, I rarely know what they're talking about, and have a hard time assisting them because I don't know what's going on in class, because I don't attend it. In terms of grading, I can only give minimal comments on assignments. Unless I give extensive comments, which is time consuming but would actually help the students to improve on a variety of skills, they get very little in terms of feedback. All of these compromises are the result of being overworked, and the technique of cutting corners to make the hours fit is a bad compromise. In the end, it's the students who suffer from all of this.
• A professor for a class would not return emails when asked for a grading rubric (and we couldn't grade until we were given the rubric). Two days before three assignments' grades were due, the professor finally sends grading rubrics and reminds us that the grades are due in a couple of days. This required hours upon hours of grading in addition to two 2-hour labs, two one and a half hour classes, two office hours, and a weekly one-hour meeting. When told that it would be nearly impossible to get the grading done in that short of time, I was told that I could have one more day--which I took. I spent three solid days grading. This, of course, was in addition to my course load. This happened more than once over the course of the term.
• As a GTF, I was routinely expected to grade between 50 and 100 finals in a three or four day period. At .40FTE, I would only have 26 hours or so to grade the finals without going over my 15% in one week. I chose to go over.
• In a social science department, a GTF reports having a .40 FTE for 108 students with the usual requirement to grade midterms, paper, and finals. With just three assignments per student, this is 324 assignments for one GTF to grade. The instructor of the class was also a GTF so s/he agreed to grade some of the papers, even though this put he/r over his/her hours for the term.
A GTF was told by his supervisor that the supervisor did not think that the .20FTE the GTF was assigned would be enough for the class. The professor told the GTF to keep track of his hours and report to the professor when he reached 88 hours. The professor told him there would be no additional FTE for the GTF that term, but the report would help the professor get additional FTE in future terms.
• A professor had the class of 100 students make notes on all their readings in a notebook. He also had them write their papers and take their exams in the notebook. After the Friday midterm, the GTF was expected to have the papers and exams graded for all 100 students over the weekend so the professor could return the notebooks on Monday.
• I exceeded my .49FTE on courses I taught for the first time, often in time spent on preparation alone, and certainly when combining prep time with the actual hours devoted to teaching. I have been told this is a more or less universal experience among GTF instructors in our department when doing "new preps" for courses we have not previously taught.
• When a GTF complained to the Department Head about overwork in a social science class, the GTF was told that the professor they were assigned to work for was an older gentleman who just could not be made to understand the hours provision of the CBA, so the department makes an exception for him. The GTF was just unlucky to have this professor, but the GTF might, in the future, have an assignment that did not require all the hours, so it would all balance out.
• My first term at UO I worked almost twice the hours limit. My professor claimed that I wasn't grading exams and papers as quickly as he allotted, and that I should speed up. I knew that if I graded any faster I would be doing a bad and unprofessional job, so I made the decision to grade at a reasonable pace and not tell the professor that I worked almost twice the hours limit.
• In an Education program, the Department Head tells the GTFs that they are paid to work an assignment, not by the hour. If a GTF complains, they are told that it is the job of a teacher to be dedicated to the students and if they don’t think of it that way, then perhaps education is not the field for them.
• I was assigned to teach a 300 level course with sections. There were five sections with two sections at the same time and another two at the same time. I was assigned one GTF at .40FTE. We have never had to cover more than three sections at once and functionally the GTF could not cover two sections at once. So instead of assigning another GTF to cover the sections, the department had me cancel sections to make the other sections bigger than they would be under normal circumstances. I knew there was no way my GTF could do that much work, but there was nothing I could do about it.
• In my department, GTFs are asked to teach 3 sections (3 hours) and attend lecture (3 more hours). We are also asked to have 2 hours of office hours. This is already about half of our assigned hours for the week.
In addition to these 8 hours, we are expected to manage almost 100 students. This includes grading papers, tests and quizzes. The hours for this part of the job varies based on the professor but I know one professor (a few years ago) who had 5 writing assignments, in addition to a final and a midterm. This meant grading close to 100 papers, every other week. We are asked to keep attendance and manage grades, which means inputting them into Blackboard. Entering attendance and grades for 100 students each week, takes at least a half hour.
Besides the actual data management, there is the additional burden of simply communicating with this number of students. I know that I spent at least an hour per week (usually more) dealing with student emails.
Finally, and this is the real kicker, when all the visible work is done and accounted for, there is very little time left to actually prep your sections (reading the assigned course readings, coming up with lesson plans, looking for media resources or activities, etc). This is often times the only place where people can actually consolidate hours. But, what it means to NOT work over your hours is that you enter the classroom unprepared and your students get a watered-down version of an education. I know this is where many GTFs go over their hours. Most of us (at least in my department) want to get jobs in academia, which means teaching (at least to some degree). This is something that many people take seriously. I know that I would absolutely work over my hours to give my students a better learning experience.
• I'm seeing this issue come up more as the enrollment 'surge' has increased our class sizes, but for upper-division courses w/o discussion sessions there is no increase in the GTF FTE (since 2006, 300-level courses have gone from 90 enrollment max to up to 134 for some courses), and it is starting to become an issue, this term in particular.
• Anyone that doesn’t know that GTFs over work our hours doesn’t have the first effing clue how this university works. Have they ever been to graduate school?
• One professor told his GTF that leading three discussion sections did not equal 3 hours of work, but rather only 2.5 hours, as the classes were 50 minutes long. The professor said that he was not paying a GTF to walk from class back to their office.
• 4 gtfs have to teach 3 lab sections apiece with 20 students each. This is 12 hours of in class time a week. In the remaining hours they have to prepare lesson plans, make handouts/tutorials, answer emails, grade 60 projects 4 times a quarter, have office hours etc. To do a good job takes a minimum of 25 hours a week. Those that i talked to did not want to complain for fear of losing their assignments for the next year, as problems in the department indicate this is a possibility. (or the work being pushed on the adjunct instructor who is nice and not paid much more than they are.)
• One GTF in one of these 300-level courses has 123 students (though the max for the course 134). She has had to grade a ten-page midterm paper and a fifteen questions short answer (a paragraph) and essay midterm exam. She is just now finishing that grading. She will also have an even longer final and another 15 page final paper to grade, both during finals week. The prof didn't provide any guidelines for how to grade the papers and she had to spend some time creating a rubric. (She's an international student not used to how much of the decisions for grading are put on us and wanted a rubric to make sure she was consistent). She also has to grade a weekly quiz, go to class and hold office hours. When she asked for help in grading the final he said he was leaving town for break and wouldn't be able to help. I have no idea how she is going to finish the grading on time, much less even think about the final papers for her own seminars.
• I have a professor that tells me that if I answer student questions outside of office hours that I cannot count those hours toward my GTF assignment.
• My adjunct professor had the students turn in their papers right before he left for a week to do a job interview (he cancelled one class and had me ‘guest lecture’ one class). He gave me a rubric with which to grade the student’s papers. I thought it was a really tough rubric “I can’t see giving a student an ‘A’ if they have more than two grammar errors.” I graded all the papers and gave them back when I lectured. When he returned many of the students complained about the low grades. He announced to the class that they should bring their papers to my office so that I could re-grade them because I had done such a poor job. Neither the prep time for the guest lecture nor the re-grading was counted toward my GTF time.
• In our department, the GTFs were forced to collectively issue a statement pointing out that one particular class had more papers due than comparable classes in the department, twenty quizzes, a discussion board the GTFs were asked to monitor, study groups, surveys and more. Despite issuing a collective statement, they GTFs received no response from the department, although they were relieved to see that in future terms the course load was reduced.
• Professor E. wanted 6 papers of 6 pages each from the students with each GTF in the class responsible for approximately 90 students. We objected that this was a contract violation waiting to happen. The professor eventually agreed to reduce the number of papers to 5. The professor told us to spend no more than two minutes per page so that we would not go over our hours. This not only was not enough time to give feedback, it is barely enough to time to figure out what the students are saying.
When a student is telling you about escaping from a Russian orphanage and surviving on the streets of Moscow, it’s hard not to give feedback because time is up. Actually, I went over my allotted two minutes per page on that one.
• I spoke with a professor about going over my workload with a specific course - I had tracked hours and had gone far over, with weekly, two-part quizzes to grade and record for 60 students, 4 papers throughout the term, and several out-of-class obligations that we were required to keep attendance for, on top of regular GTF duties (lectures, sections, reading, emails, etc.). Upon hearing my concerns, she said she had never heard these complaints before (which was untrue), and that her course did not have more work than others of the same level.
The following year, she added more work for GTFs for the course, which included more out-of-class obligations (each GTF had to lead small group discussions, outside of sections, doing close reading with very difficult texts).
• At a department orientation my first year, it was noted that it takes longer to grade papers when one is new at it, so it was not encouraged to track work hours unless it was noted that you already felt like you were going way over. In that instance, tracking work hours was more for the benefit of cutting down time rather than adjusting any work levels for the course.
• For a class in which I had a FIG, I held two extra study sessions for them, independent of office hours and sections. Each of these lasted over two hours.
• A colleague of mine right now addresses an average of 5-7 emails a day from students. The course he's GTFing is notoriously hard, and most of the questions go to the GTF rather than the professor. On top of this, he has had to work through several difficult homework problems with students (both inside and outside of sections, sometimes in grading) only to find errors in the textbook which make the problems impossible to solve (or incorrect). It has fallen on him to contact the professor after reading dozens of frantic e-mails from students about the errors. He has also spent many extra hours in meetings with students, more than doubling his regular office hour commitments on several weeks (some weeks more than tripling them).
• In one course the GTFs were asked to use the professor's own rubric for grading papers. While helpful in some respects, it took a very long time to complete each paper this way: upon beginning the process I was working for an hour on each paper. The process improved, but I was still spending about 30 minutes per paper (and I was timing these so as not to go wildly over). So 40 students, 30 minutes per paper: 20 hours of grading. That was only one paper cycle: the course had two (and other, less involved grading processes). So 40 hours of grading, spent across 3 weeks (combined turnaround time). This is, of course, not including any other regular GTF work: 7 hours just in face-time (lecture, sections, office hours), many more hours in reading and prep.
• Last year, my professor had me turn around 124 (short answer/essay) finals in 5 days. I actually had to camp in the office for two days and one night in order to make the deadline @ 8 am (wasn't done till 5am.)
Although I think the numbers do a good job to quantify exactly how much I go over in hours per quarter, I can tell you a story too. The way this story has ended would give an example of exactly why it sucks to speak up to a professor and how I have lost any chance of a future letter of recommendation from them.
Fall quarter 2009 I was enrolled in 15 credits (my advisor's insistence, even though I expressed that it would be too much), involved with 2 research projects (1 project gave me 0.1 FTE), and with 0.2 FTE from teaching two labs and 0.15 FTE for a position that I had been given as the "lecture GTF" of a 230 person lecture class (to total .45 FTE). The area where my hours went ridiculously over was the lecture GTF position of 0.15 FTE. No contract was signed ahead of time that 15% of one quarter's total FTE would be assigned in any one week, and there were two weeks (midterm 1 and 2 grading) where I did an additional 9-10 hours on top of the hours already assigned for the course. The way the professor had figured the hours was that I would be present in lecture to deal with the homework, grade a portion of the homework, manage the TAs, manage student problems with the way the TAs had graded their work, and handle the grading and grade entry for the exams. This was assumed to happen in approximately 6 hours per week (.15 is 65.7 hours I believe...I am never sure since they do not put the actual hours in our contracts, but Dan thought that might be it). Attending lecture alone (coming early and staying late for homework issues with the 230 students) took 4 hours per week.
Grading my portion of the student's homework took 2 hours per week if I graded super-fast. This did not take into account the midterm grading (about 20 hours), questions and issues the TAs had, questions and issues the students had with the TA's grading of their work, the extra little assignments she sent my way (such as setting up a way to turn in assignments on Blackboard). There was no way on earth that .15 FTE covered this position, and I believe she knew this going into the quarter. Although I recognize I should have spoken up earlier, I had so much on my plate that I dreaded her wrath. Before the final exam I let her know I had well-exceeded my hours already, since according to my calculations I was at over 130 hours (yes, for a job that was allotted 65.7 hours per quarter). She was irritated that I had dumped this on her "at the last minute" and begrudingly and angrily did the final exam grading herself. She called me a "martyr" and said that she would have been able to fix things if I had spoken up sooner. Personally, I don't know what could have been fixed, the position was obviously more work than 0.15 FTE (more like 0.30 FTE).
Unfortunately, I still work with her, and we are still awkward in working with each other to this day. She teaches in the area I hope to teach in, so her letter of recommendation would have been very helpful to me.
• One particular issue we're encountering right now is what our department calls "Internships". As GTFs we are often assigned interns from the undergraduate teaching course to act as a TA in our classroom. We are expected to draw up a contract with them, meet outside of class, mentor them for potentially teaching our class, and then complete written evaluations for them on top of our own work for the class we teach. We are not compensated in our .fte or given academic credit for this. I typically meet with my intern 1-2 times every week for 45 minutes to 1 hour each. Including my own preparation to meet with her, and write up an evaluation (the content of this is yet to be clarified), this could easily equate to a .05 addition to my .fte, which would then be at a .45 fte.
As a third year, it seems natural that we are chosen to take on this task, however considering our teaching load, course load, and thesis work, the added work without a comparable compensation is quite frustrating.
• I'm assigned as a .2 GTF for a class that has roughly 60 students who turn in 2 assignments per week. I'm the only GTF assigned to this class. Since I've GTFed the class before, I suggested that I shouldn't attend class to get that extra 3 hours for grading, and the professor agreed. I can sometimes get the assignments graded in the 8 hours I have every week, but answering student emails often puts me over the top. Also, the feedback I give on the assignments is *very* minimal.
In all fairness, the professor I work for has told me before that he'd help out with grading if I was going over on my hours. But I know he doesn't want to, and he's on my dissertation committee, and I'm strongly trying to hit him up for a GTF position for this summer so I don't have to pay tuition. So even when I'm close to (or going over) my hours, I don't tell him. I don't think it would affect his efforts to get me the summer GTF, but I can't take that chance.
• In Spring of 2008, I taught my own class, a 300 level course with 90 students. Even though a GTF would normally be assigned for such a class, I wasn't given one. With no grading assistance I had to make a decision, I could either work over my hours, or I could cheat my students out of the educational experience they deserved, shown more movies, spent less time on lecturing. I could have cut back on the assignments I gave students, I could have cut back on the feedback that I gave on assignments. It was crucial that I worked over my hours. I wasn't willing to sacrifice my students education in order fulfill my own obligation to work under my FTE hours.
• Since my professor is going out of the country over finals week, the final is given to the students this Wednesday and he expects us to have it graded by Friday, with the final grades calculated by the following Monday morning. This also includes an assignment and quiz that they're giving us tomorrow. We also have a meeting at 7:15 tomorrow morning, and we still have labs to teach on Friday AFTER the final is given. Isn't that a fun dead week!
• In a large lecture class of 250 students , there are 2 .2 gtfs. They are required to attend 3 hours of class each week. The class has 9 weekly assignments and a final to grade, roughly 125 assignments to grade each week in 4 hours. When asking the adjunct professor how this was to be done, she said there was no more money and to get it done in the time. She recommended drinking a bottle of wine while grading to make it go quicker.
• In my GTF assignment, I lead two labs and have 30 students total. The class often has two assignments due within one week. That means I have 60 assignments to grade. I am supposed to spend 8 hours grading each week. To grade within 8 hours, I would have to spend only 8 minutes grading each assignment. Many assignments are audio or video assignments which require me to connect to the data server, open the individual student file, play the assignment, which is approximately 3 minutes in length, then enter the grade in my grading spreadsheet, enter the grade on Blackboard, enter the students scores on the grading rubric, provide brief written comments, and print or e-mail the grading sheet. This process simply cannot be accomplished in 8 minutes or less. I certainly cannot give a quality assessment of student grades within this timeframe.
If a GTF in my assignment will go over their hours due to grading, they are supposed to attend fewer than the required two lectures for the class each week. Due to the fact that I was going over hours in the first few weeks of class, I started attending fewer than two lectures to stay within my hours. I was then asked to meet with the instructor of the course and was told that it was important that I attend the lectures. When I said that I was going over hours, I was told to spend less time grading the assignments. If I spend only 8 minutes or less to assess each assignment, I will not do a quality job of providing feedback and accurately tracking my students' assignments.
There is also no extra room in the schedule for correspondence with students. The breakdown of my schedule is 8 hours per week grading, 3 hours per week in lecture, 4 hours per week leading labs, and 1 hour for office hours. If I spend any additional time responding to student e-mails, e-mailing students about files they have improperly submitted or missing assignments, I will go over my hours.
It is not possible to perform my job adequately within the 16 hours I am allotted. Therefore, I either go over my hours to perform a satisfactory job or I stay within my hours and do not keep up with grading assignments and providing quality written feedback.
• In large lecture classes there are 3 .2 FTE GTFs for 250 students, and 9 assignments, of a larger caliber. When asked of one of the professors, how to get the grading of a large video projects done in the hours, She rolled her eyes and responded she 'didn’t care, get it done. You are lucky you have a GTF at all,' and that she never had a GTF equivalent in her grad school.
• I worked a class on Demography and I had to grade 150 exams (short answer + essay, expected to give feedback) in a four day stretch, definitely worked more than 15% of my hours in a week.
• A GTF had a tech position for two years straight. The second year they increased her duties substantially adding additional labs she was to be responsible for. When she asked if her FTE could be increased they responded the department didn’t have the funds to do that. When she asked about the additional work, they told her something along the lines of she should consider the needs of her students, departments, and her recommendations upon leaving.
I think my response might be totally useless for what you want.
Sorry to be so long winded. I don't have time to edit this down - just sending it as is.
AND I am VERY worried that these concerns might somehow filter back to my boss.
That would not be okay.
So please use anything you like from this ramble - but be very cautious to protect my boss' identity and thus my relationship with him.
I know I can count on your confidentiality.
One point to bring up at the start is -
We NEED our GTF to survive.
We do NOT piss off the professor by complaining.
We just DO what they want and bitch amongst ourselves.
The power differential here is tremendous.
There is NO WAY that I want even a HINT of this getting back to my personal professor.
I value my GTF beyond measure.
So you can see I cannot afford for him to get any hint of discontent from my direction.
Also - he is a gifted lecturer and fine human being.
When I try to let him know that he is making life inconvenient for me - he just doesn't seem to get it.
He lives in his own world and he is a very important man, for real reasons.
• I'm a GTF in a large lecture class (140 students), and I ran into a labor issue at the beginning of the quarter. I felt we were being overworked (there are several GTFs in the class), and if the work load had continued at that pace, we eventually would have run out of hours before the quarter ended. As a way to reduce labor hours, the instructor claimed we didn't have to come to lectures and we could basically not grade so thoroughly. As a result, when asked some questions from my students in regards to class assignments, I rarely know what they're talking about, and have a hard time assisting them because I don't know what's going on in class, because I don't attend it. In terms of grading, I can only give minimal comments on assignments. Unless I give extensive comments, which is time consuming but would actually help the students to improve on a variety of skills, they get very little in terms of feedback. All of these compromises are the result of being overworked, and the technique of cutting corners to make the hours fit is a bad compromise. In the end, it's the students who suffer from all of this.
• A professor for a class would not return emails when asked for a grading rubric (and we couldn't grade until we were given the rubric). Two days before three assignments' grades were due, the professor finally sends grading rubrics and reminds us that the grades are due in a couple of days. This required hours upon hours of grading in addition to two 2-hour labs, two one and a half hour classes, two office hours, and a weekly one-hour meeting. When told that it would be nearly impossible to get the grading done in that short of time, I was told that I could have one more day--which I took. I spent three solid days grading. This, of course, was in addition to my course load. This happened more than once over the course of the term.
• As a GTF, I was routinely expected to grade between 50 and 100 finals in a three or four day period. At .40FTE, I would only have 26 hours or so to grade the finals without going over my 15% in one week. I chose to go over.
• In a social science department, a GTF reports having a .40 FTE for 108 students with the usual requirement to grade midterms, paper, and finals. With just three assignments per student, this is 324 assignments for one GTF to grade. The instructor of the class was also a GTF so s/he agreed to grade some of the papers, even though this put he/r over his/her hours for the term.
A GTF was told by his supervisor that the supervisor did not think that the .20FTE the GTF was assigned would be enough for the class. The professor told the GTF to keep track of his hours and report to the professor when he reached 88 hours. The professor told him there would be no additional FTE for the GTF that term, but the report would help the professor get additional FTE in future terms.
• A professor had the class of 100 students make notes on all their readings in a notebook. He also had them write their papers and take their exams in the notebook. After the Friday midterm, the GTF was expected to have the papers and exams graded for all 100 students over the weekend so the professor could return the notebooks on Monday.
• I exceeded my .49FTE on courses I taught for the first time, often in time spent on preparation alone, and certainly when combining prep time with the actual hours devoted to teaching. I have been told this is a more or less universal experience among GTF instructors in our department when doing "new preps" for courses we have not previously taught.
• When a GTF complained to the Department Head about overwork in a social science class, the GTF was told that the professor they were assigned to work for was an older gentleman who just could not be made to understand the hours provision of the CBA, so the department makes an exception for him. The GTF was just unlucky to have this professor, but the GTF might, in the future, have an assignment that did not require all the hours, so it would all balance out.
• My first term at UO I worked almost twice the hours limit. My professor claimed that I wasn't grading exams and papers as quickly as he allotted, and that I should speed up. I knew that if I graded any faster I would be doing a bad and unprofessional job, so I made the decision to grade at a reasonable pace and not tell the professor that I worked almost twice the hours limit.
• In an Education program, the Department Head tells the GTFs that they are paid to work an assignment, not by the hour. If a GTF complains, they are told that it is the job of a teacher to be dedicated to the students and if they don’t think of it that way, then perhaps education is not the field for them.
• I was assigned to teach a 300 level course with sections. There were five sections with two sections at the same time and another two at the same time. I was assigned one GTF at .40FTE. We have never had to cover more than three sections at once and functionally the GTF could not cover two sections at once. So instead of assigning another GTF to cover the sections, the department had me cancel sections to make the other sections bigger than they would be under normal circumstances. I knew there was no way my GTF could do that much work, but there was nothing I could do about it.
• In my department, GTFs are asked to teach 3 sections (3 hours) and attend lecture (3 more hours). We are also asked to have 2 hours of office hours. This is already about half of our assigned hours for the week.
In addition to these 8 hours, we are expected to manage almost 100 students. This includes grading papers, tests and quizzes. The hours for this part of the job varies based on the professor but I know one professor (a few years ago) who had 5 writing assignments, in addition to a final and a midterm. This meant grading close to 100 papers, every other week. We are asked to keep attendance and manage grades, which means inputting them into Blackboard. Entering attendance and grades for 100 students each week, takes at least a half hour.
Besides the actual data management, there is the additional burden of simply communicating with this number of students. I know that I spent at least an hour per week (usually more) dealing with student emails.
Finally, and this is the real kicker, when all the visible work is done and accounted for, there is very little time left to actually prep your sections (reading the assigned course readings, coming up with lesson plans, looking for media resources or activities, etc). This is often times the only place where people can actually consolidate hours. But, what it means to NOT work over your hours is that you enter the classroom unprepared and your students get a watered-down version of an education. I know this is where many GTFs go over their hours. Most of us (at least in my department) want to get jobs in academia, which means teaching (at least to some degree). This is something that many people take seriously. I know that I would absolutely work over my hours to give my students a better learning experience.
• I'm seeing this issue come up more as the enrollment 'surge' has increased our class sizes, but for upper-division courses w/o discussion sessions there is no increase in the GTF FTE (since 2006, 300-level courses have gone from 90 enrollment max to up to 134 for some courses), and it is starting to become an issue, this term in particular.
• Anyone that doesn’t know that GTFs over work our hours doesn’t have the first effing clue how this university works. Have they ever been to graduate school?
• One professor told his GTF that leading three discussion sections did not equal 3 hours of work, but rather only 2.5 hours, as the classes were 50 minutes long. The professor said that he was not paying a GTF to walk from class back to their office.
• 4 gtfs have to teach 3 lab sections apiece with 20 students each. This is 12 hours of in class time a week. In the remaining hours they have to prepare lesson plans, make handouts/tutorials, answer emails, grade 60 projects 4 times a quarter, have office hours etc. To do a good job takes a minimum of 25 hours a week. Those that i talked to did not want to complain for fear of losing their assignments for the next year, as problems in the department indicate this is a possibility. (or the work being pushed on the adjunct instructor who is nice and not paid much more than they are.)
• One GTF in one of these 300-level courses has 123 students (though the max for the course 134). She has had to grade a ten-page midterm paper and a fifteen questions short answer (a paragraph) and essay midterm exam. She is just now finishing that grading. She will also have an even longer final and another 15 page final paper to grade, both during finals week. The prof didn't provide any guidelines for how to grade the papers and she had to spend some time creating a rubric. (She's an international student not used to how much of the decisions for grading are put on us and wanted a rubric to make sure she was consistent). She also has to grade a weekly quiz, go to class and hold office hours. When she asked for help in grading the final he said he was leaving town for break and wouldn't be able to help. I have no idea how she is going to finish the grading on time, much less even think about the final papers for her own seminars.
• I have a professor that tells me that if I answer student questions outside of office hours that I cannot count those hours toward my GTF assignment.
• My adjunct professor had the students turn in their papers right before he left for a week to do a job interview (he cancelled one class and had me ‘guest lecture’ one class). He gave me a rubric with which to grade the student’s papers. I thought it was a really tough rubric “I can’t see giving a student an ‘A’ if they have more than two grammar errors.” I graded all the papers and gave them back when I lectured. When he returned many of the students complained about the low grades. He announced to the class that they should bring their papers to my office so that I could re-grade them because I had done such a poor job. Neither the prep time for the guest lecture nor the re-grading was counted toward my GTF time.
• In our department, the GTFs were forced to collectively issue a statement pointing out that one particular class had more papers due than comparable classes in the department, twenty quizzes, a discussion board the GTFs were asked to monitor, study groups, surveys and more. Despite issuing a collective statement, they GTFs received no response from the department, although they were relieved to see that in future terms the course load was reduced.
• Professor E. wanted 6 papers of 6 pages each from the students with each GTF in the class responsible for approximately 90 students. We objected that this was a contract violation waiting to happen. The professor eventually agreed to reduce the number of papers to 5. The professor told us to spend no more than two minutes per page so that we would not go over our hours. This not only was not enough time to give feedback, it is barely enough to time to figure out what the students are saying.
When a student is telling you about escaping from a Russian orphanage and surviving on the streets of Moscow, it’s hard not to give feedback because time is up. Actually, I went over my allotted two minutes per page on that one.
• I spoke with a professor about going over my workload with a specific course - I had tracked hours and had gone far over, with weekly, two-part quizzes to grade and record for 60 students, 4 papers throughout the term, and several out-of-class obligations that we were required to keep attendance for, on top of regular GTF duties (lectures, sections, reading, emails, etc.). Upon hearing my concerns, she said she had never heard these complaints before (which was untrue), and that her course did not have more work than others of the same level.
The following year, she added more work for GTFs for the course, which included more out-of-class obligations (each GTF had to lead small group discussions, outside of sections, doing close reading with very difficult texts).
• At a department orientation my first year, it was noted that it takes longer to grade papers when one is new at it, so it was not encouraged to track work hours unless it was noted that you already felt like you were going way over. In that instance, tracking work hours was more for the benefit of cutting down time rather than adjusting any work levels for the course.
• For a class in which I had a FIG, I held two extra study sessions for them, independent of office hours and sections. Each of these lasted over two hours.
• A colleague of mine right now addresses an average of 5-7 emails a day from students. The course he's GTFing is notoriously hard, and most of the questions go to the GTF rather than the professor. On top of this, he has had to work through several difficult homework problems with students (both inside and outside of sections, sometimes in grading) only to find errors in the textbook which make the problems impossible to solve (or incorrect). It has fallen on him to contact the professor after reading dozens of frantic e-mails from students about the errors. He has also spent many extra hours in meetings with students, more than doubling his regular office hour commitments on several weeks (some weeks more than tripling them).
• In one course the GTFs were asked to use the professor's own rubric for grading papers. While helpful in some respects, it took a very long time to complete each paper this way: upon beginning the process I was working for an hour on each paper. The process improved, but I was still spending about 30 minutes per paper (and I was timing these so as not to go wildly over). So 40 students, 30 minutes per paper: 20 hours of grading. That was only one paper cycle: the course had two (and other, less involved grading processes). So 40 hours of grading, spent across 3 weeks (combined turnaround time). This is, of course, not including any other regular GTF work: 7 hours just in face-time (lecture, sections, office hours), many more hours in reading and prep.
• Last year, my professor had me turn around 124 (short answer/essay) finals in 5 days. I actually had to camp in the office for two days and one night in order to make the deadline @ 8 am (wasn't done till 5am.)
Although I think the numbers do a good job to quantify exactly how much I go over in hours per quarter, I can tell you a story too. The way this story has ended would give an example of exactly why it sucks to speak up to a professor and how I have lost any chance of a future letter of recommendation from them.
Fall quarter 2009 I was enrolled in 15 credits (my advisor's insistence, even though I expressed that it would be too much), involved with 2 research projects (1 project gave me 0.1 FTE), and with 0.2 FTE from teaching two labs and 0.15 FTE for a position that I had been given as the "lecture GTF" of a 230 person lecture class (to total .45 FTE). The area where my hours went ridiculously over was the lecture GTF position of 0.15 FTE. No contract was signed ahead of time that 15% of one quarter's total FTE would be assigned in any one week, and there were two weeks (midterm 1 and 2 grading) where I did an additional 9-10 hours on top of the hours already assigned for the course. The way the professor had figured the hours was that I would be present in lecture to deal with the homework, grade a portion of the homework, manage the TAs, manage student problems with the way the TAs had graded their work, and handle the grading and grade entry for the exams. This was assumed to happen in approximately 6 hours per week (.15 is 65.7 hours I believe...I am never sure since they do not put the actual hours in our contracts, but Dan thought that might be it). Attending lecture alone (coming early and staying late for homework issues with the 230 students) took 4 hours per week.
Grading my portion of the student's homework took 2 hours per week if I graded super-fast. This did not take into account the midterm grading (about 20 hours), questions and issues the TAs had, questions and issues the students had with the TA's grading of their work, the extra little assignments she sent my way (such as setting up a way to turn in assignments on Blackboard). There was no way on earth that .15 FTE covered this position, and I believe she knew this going into the quarter. Although I recognize I should have spoken up earlier, I had so much on my plate that I dreaded her wrath. Before the final exam I let her know I had well-exceeded my hours already, since according to my calculations I was at over 130 hours (yes, for a job that was allotted 65.7 hours per quarter). She was irritated that I had dumped this on her "at the last minute" and begrudingly and angrily did the final exam grading herself. She called me a "martyr" and said that she would have been able to fix things if I had spoken up sooner. Personally, I don't know what could have been fixed, the position was obviously more work than 0.15 FTE (more like 0.30 FTE).
Unfortunately, I still work with her, and we are still awkward in working with each other to this day. She teaches in the area I hope to teach in, so her letter of recommendation would have been very helpful to me.
• One particular issue we're encountering right now is what our department calls "Internships". As GTFs we are often assigned interns from the undergraduate teaching course to act as a TA in our classroom. We are expected to draw up a contract with them, meet outside of class, mentor them for potentially teaching our class, and then complete written evaluations for them on top of our own work for the class we teach. We are not compensated in our .fte or given academic credit for this. I typically meet with my intern 1-2 times every week for 45 minutes to 1 hour each. Including my own preparation to meet with her, and write up an evaluation (the content of this is yet to be clarified), this could easily equate to a .05 addition to my .fte, which would then be at a .45 fte.
As a third year, it seems natural that we are chosen to take on this task, however considering our teaching load, course load, and thesis work, the added work without a comparable compensation is quite frustrating.
• I'm assigned as a .2 GTF for a class that has roughly 60 students who turn in 2 assignments per week. I'm the only GTF assigned to this class. Since I've GTFed the class before, I suggested that I shouldn't attend class to get that extra 3 hours for grading, and the professor agreed. I can sometimes get the assignments graded in the 8 hours I have every week, but answering student emails often puts me over the top. Also, the feedback I give on the assignments is *very* minimal.
In all fairness, the professor I work for has told me before that he'd help out with grading if I was going over on my hours. But I know he doesn't want to, and he's on my dissertation committee, and I'm strongly trying to hit him up for a GTF position for this summer so I don't have to pay tuition. So even when I'm close to (or going over) my hours, I don't tell him. I don't think it would affect his efforts to get me the summer GTF, but I can't take that chance.
• In Spring of 2008, I taught my own class, a 300 level course with 90 students. Even though a GTF would normally be assigned for such a class, I wasn't given one. With no grading assistance I had to make a decision, I could either work over my hours, or I could cheat my students out of the educational experience they deserved, shown more movies, spent less time on lecturing. I could have cut back on the assignments I gave students, I could have cut back on the feedback that I gave on assignments. It was crucial that I worked over my hours. I wasn't willing to sacrifice my students education in order fulfill my own obligation to work under my FTE hours.
• Since my professor is going out of the country over finals week, the final is given to the students this Wednesday and he expects us to have it graded by Friday, with the final grades calculated by the following Monday morning. This also includes an assignment and quiz that they're giving us tomorrow. We also have a meeting at 7:15 tomorrow morning, and we still have labs to teach on Friday AFTER the final is given. Isn't that a fun dead week!
• In a large lecture class of 250 students , there are 2 .2 gtfs. They are required to attend 3 hours of class each week. The class has 9 weekly assignments and a final to grade, roughly 125 assignments to grade each week in 4 hours. When asking the adjunct professor how this was to be done, she said there was no more money and to get it done in the time. She recommended drinking a bottle of wine while grading to make it go quicker.
• In my GTF assignment, I lead two labs and have 30 students total. The class often has two assignments due within one week. That means I have 60 assignments to grade. I am supposed to spend 8 hours grading each week. To grade within 8 hours, I would have to spend only 8 minutes grading each assignment. Many assignments are audio or video assignments which require me to connect to the data server, open the individual student file, play the assignment, which is approximately 3 minutes in length, then enter the grade in my grading spreadsheet, enter the grade on Blackboard, enter the students scores on the grading rubric, provide brief written comments, and print or e-mail the grading sheet. This process simply cannot be accomplished in 8 minutes or less. I certainly cannot give a quality assessment of student grades within this timeframe.
If a GTF in my assignment will go over their hours due to grading, they are supposed to attend fewer than the required two lectures for the class each week. Due to the fact that I was going over hours in the first few weeks of class, I started attending fewer than two lectures to stay within my hours. I was then asked to meet with the instructor of the course and was told that it was important that I attend the lectures. When I said that I was going over hours, I was told to spend less time grading the assignments. If I spend only 8 minutes or less to assess each assignment, I will not do a quality job of providing feedback and accurately tracking my students' assignments.
There is also no extra room in the schedule for correspondence with students. The breakdown of my schedule is 8 hours per week grading, 3 hours per week in lecture, 4 hours per week leading labs, and 1 hour for office hours. If I spend any additional time responding to student e-mails, e-mailing students about files they have improperly submitted or missing assignments, I will go over my hours.
It is not possible to perform my job adequately within the 16 hours I am allotted. Therefore, I either go over my hours to perform a satisfactory job or I stay within my hours and do not keep up with grading assignments and providing quality written feedback.
• In large lecture classes there are 3 .2 FTE GTFs for 250 students, and 9 assignments, of a larger caliber. When asked of one of the professors, how to get the grading of a large video projects done in the hours, She rolled her eyes and responded she 'didn’t care, get it done. You are lucky you have a GTF at all,' and that she never had a GTF equivalent in her grad school.
• I worked a class on Demography and I had to grade 150 exams (short answer + essay, expected to give feedback) in a four day stretch, definitely worked more than 15% of my hours in a week.
• A GTF had a tech position for two years straight. The second year they increased her duties substantially adding additional labs she was to be responsible for. When she asked if her FTE could be increased they responded the department didn’t have the funds to do that. When she asked about the additional work, they told her something along the lines of she should consider the needs of her students, departments, and her recommendations upon leaving.
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