Does your institution or department have a set of schedule rules?
BNCC has the following among their rules:
- All faculty will be on campus 5 days per week, unless they are teaching TWO night classes (6:00-8:50)... then "an effort" will be made to give them a 4 day per week schedule.
- No 'back to back' classes... i.e. you can't have a class at 8:50 if you also want to teach one at 7:45 or 9:55.
9 comments:
I have to keep a certain amount of office hours per time spent in class and so do regular faculty. no other rules, to my knowledge.
We have no rules about when our classes can/must be scheduled, but we are required to hold 10 office hours a week, and office hours must be held every weekday. The idea is to make sure we're on campus five days a week.
We don't have any rules about class times. We just have to be at school a total of 32 hours per week, including classes & office hours. All full-time instructors teach 6 classes per semester (24 hours) or 5 (20) if we have other duties. Department chairs teach 3 classes p/semester (15).
No rules at all as far as I know... other than that we do have to hold some contact hours (though it's something like 1 per class or something, and it's now written into our department handbook that online contact hours can count in that tally).
Those are two very goofy rules. They must make life interesting for the person who does the scheduling.
The only rules I know of that we have involve office hours: 5 hours per week minimum.
Considering that I drive 30 miles to work and have to fight through some pretty heavy traffic to do so, I'm really glad I'm not required to be on campus 5 days a week. Thanks to meetings, I still manage quite often to be on campus 4 days a week. That's enough, thank you. At some point, I have to stop driving and start working.
We have to hold ten hours of office hours a week, although most of us schedule about 6 and offer "by appointment." I think the goal is to have us on campus more, but a lot of the senior profs are only here two days a week (class schedules get set by seniority, so us newbies get the five-day-a-week schedules or the evening classes.)
Barb
For us, class schedules are set centrally. I would loooove to meet the person who gives me the two ends of our day (we're spolit - thats 0915 and 1715 classes) with the same group of students, and nothing in between. I prefer a break between classes (I have voice issues), and if I get one, do office hours then (which usually means no one turns up as the little dears always prefer to make appointments at non-office hour times for some reason), but there's no way of requesting that sort of detail. But you can request not to teach after a particular hour (for people who need to pick up kids from school) or not to teach on a particular day (to protect research time for research active staff).
full time staff are expected to be on campus four days out of five during teaching weeks, which seems reasonable to me, and we're also supposed to live within 20 miles of campus (this is a very old rule!) but both of these rules are regarded as non-enforced - certain 'brilliant' colleagues who get protected by the Head of Dept due to their brilliance are rarely sighted in the building... ditto profs who feel their seniority excuses them from rules...
All full time staff have to be on campus 4 days out of 5 in a teaching week (this rule is totally ignored by seniors and 'research stars'). We have minimal control over timetabling of classes, and if there are rules that the central timetabling people follow, then they are very very bizarre.
Y'all should know that we choose classes on a rotation -- So at least we have some control over what/when we teach...
We do have office hour rules, but that rule is only one hour per section -- so, most semesters it is 4 or 5 for me... not bad and no rules about when they are supposed to be.
Also, the 5 day/week rule was one of the reasons I call the blog the "Philosophy Factory" -- because the schedule rules are more like factory shift rules than rules for folks with MAs and Ph.D.s...
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