SkepticLawyer:
Have fun, Be rested [when you can]. Be inspired, ….. And come back,

Maybe when I get my civility mojo back (to pinch an idea from my namesake above), I’ll make a return. But not before.

In the fray, I forgot to wish SL all the best. Typical!

What Nabs said, and like him I hope you pass this way again.

Yeah you were a definite original SL. But why am I using the past tense? Of course, like Mark, you’ll be back too.

JPZ, Kim answered your question about the 3:1 prep/teaching ratio, but I will add a more concrete example. Sorry for the lengthy comment but its length speaks for itself; academics and other teachers, at least, will be interested in this, and it might explain a few things to students.

Say you are a good and conscientious teacher, in a discipline that is dynamic and abstract and has ideas in it, like most of the humanities subjects.

*Ignores howls of protest from illiterate hordes*

Say you are teaching, as I was, 19th centuy fiction (ie, the fiction plus the history) as one of three subjects in any given semester. You have already put in the weeks it took to design the subject, order the students’ texts from the bookshop (something you have to do nearly a year in advance as per university schedules), organise the secondary reading from the library into multiple photocopies and the Reserve section (something you also have to do the previous year), put together a course reader (now an automatic student expectation, and if well done about a week’s worth of work).

You did this while you were working on the massive grant application that every academic is now expected to put in or participate in as part of a group.

Semester begins. You are teaching one Victorian novel a week, average length 4-500 pages. For this subject, you have to give a lecture (50 mins) plus a two-hour seminar per week. If you are an academic’s bootlace, much less a good academic, you (re-)read the novel and at least some of the secondary material in the weeks before you are teaching it so that all is fresh in your mind, as well as searching for any new critical perspectives or important articles that have come up in the last twelve months.

The class has 30 students in it. (See Kim’s comments on numbers.)

After each class you spend another 20 minutes talking to students, for whom you are also required to provide two hours of office consultation time per week.

During the week you spend an average of another two hours talking to, emailing, and otherwise being consulted by individual students from that group. If a student comes to see you in a terrible state (examples from the files: pregnant; pregnant girlfriend; being sexually harassed at work; cancer of the cervix at 23; crisis about childhood trauma of rape by father during civil war in former-Yugoslavia, and I had to ring Counselling myself after that one), add in a few extra hours.

You have a constant schedule of guest seminars, VIPs to duchess about, and research group, departmental, faculty, and university meetings.

You need to maintain the records, grades and so on of each subject you teach.

You need to mark all their essays and assignments, of which there will be at least 2 per semester, ie essays or papers: 60 pieces of work at, say, 2,500 words each, to mark per subject per semester. If you are actually teaching writing, as I also was, then of course it’s much more.

You must maintain your research record and keep giving seminars and conference papers about your own work. At any given time you are expected to be working on an article or a book.

Since the university workplaces were fully computerised around 1990 or so, you also have to do all of your own record-keeping, typing and other administrative work of a kind that was formerly done by secretarial staff. You are also expected to maintain cordial relations with students who bombard you with emails at all hours.

If you are a woman, you spend extra time mopping up the tears of students who have been upset by your male colleagues, resisting sexist manoeuvres in workplace competition, dealing with constant low-grade sexual harassment of various kinds from some of the male academic staff, and periodically cleaning up in the tea-room before the fridge/microwave/sink starts to walk away by itself, to say nothing of the teatowels.

Now multiply that by the (average of) three different subjects one teaches at any given time, and you have the academic’s working week. This is what it was like when I was still doing it, and I gather it is now worse.

The trolls who have galumphed into this discussion would of course pour scorn on an example from teaching literature in any case, but it seems foolish to be concerned for a nanosecond about what the likes of Damian Whateverhisnameis thinks about literature. Or about anything else, really.

I resigned from my academic job at the end of 1997 and I gather it is even more difficult than it used to be because of the desperation about raising money. Which Australian academics are, of course, now also expected to do themselves.