...beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see...?
Some of you may have had the pleasure (?) of being in my vicinity recently during somewhat cynical outbursts relating to casual teaching, or perhaps more accurately academia altogether. This is my attempt to put those thoughts into a more structured format, and I would be quite pleased to hear any of your opinions and experiences regarding the matter.
The problem I have with the casual teaching experience is the outlandish discrepancy between the workload and the remuneration. An original tutorial is supposed to take four hours to plan and deliver, with the pay for that tutorial being somewhere around the $96 mark (correct me if I'm wrong). On the surface that sounds like a pretty decent deal. However, from my own experience, it isn't quite that simple. I have to attend the lectures and read/watch the material set for the tutorial. Lectures take two hours per week, the reading/viewing anywhere upwards of 2 hours. Then there is the actual planning of the tutorial, plus of course the delivery and consultation time. At best six hours, but most commonly around seven or eight hours per (original) tutorial. I appreciate the fact that the effort ratio goes down for repeat tutorials.
Now, you might think that eight hours per week still isn't that bad - although to think that you'd have to just accept the fact that the workload is almost double that of what I'm being paid for. This figure is also one I can't see going down that much over the years - my tutorial planning time is already fairly low, partly because I've already tutored in this unit before and can draw up a new tutorial based on last year's lesson plans. Last year I would make a point of watching each film at least twice before the tutorial, but I've decided against that this time around. I rely on past memory to a degree, and while I do my best to create innovative tutorial plans, I am also consciously trying to decrease the amount of prep time it takes. Of course, when I tutor in a new unit next semester my planning time again will skyrocket.
In last night's internship session we got somewhat carried away about the time it takes to mark assignments, which of course is "factored in" to the tutoring pay. For my current group it took be about an hour to mark each essay, including typing comments for each student. This is perhaps a time commitment that will come down to half an hour over time. How long that time will take is anyone's guess. What matters to me now is that that was 17 hours of unpaid work. I am not disputing the process itself - I think it's valuable for the students to receive detailed feedback on their work so they can improve for the next time. Last semester I had two students in particular who leaped from low Credits to the cusp of a High Distinction simply because they had obviously read the comments from the previous essay and done their best to improve. For students like that it's actually a pleasure to work a bit harder. What I do have a problem with is the fact that suddenly I have a 25-hour teaching week for the somewhat laughable compensation of less than $100.
Let's keep in mind that one of the conditions of an APA/UPA is that you are only allowed to work 8 hours per week without it affecting your scholarship. The point of that restriction is not to make sure we don't earn more money - otherwise they'd put a limit on earnings, not hours. The point is to make sure our focus remains on the research, that whatever work we do doesn't interfere with our primary function. That 25 hours of teaching and marking has to come from somewhere, and academic jobs aren't just handed out to people with lots of teaching experience - you have to have a good PhD as well.
Admittedly I have some reservations about the "academic job"-carrot as well. Those jobs don't grow on trees. Stringing people mainly in their 20s and 30s along on casual appointments with the myth of academic positions somewhere in the future doesn't sit well with me. First, uni funding hasn't exactly increased over the years, and with modern medicine the tenured staff live longer and longer... Second, if you and your department know you will be teaching in this unit this semester and that unit next semester, what would be the problem of actually having a fractional contract? They need you as much as you need them, how about they add some job security into the mix? It takes quite a lot of disbelief suspension to actually think casual teaching is the best deal we can get while waiting for that magical day when we all get tenure and research funding and journals beg to have our latest pearls of magnificence published on their pages.
You may want to point out that "that's just how academia works - our piddly little problems are just training for the really hard stuff our supervisors face every day". Fair enough. And I don't for a second think I'm getting a tougher deal than anyone else. And this is what really bothers me. If I could honestly say the system is somehow prejudiced against me particularly, my discipline group has no respect for me yadda yadda, at least I could go all unionist on their...um, bottoms. But they put up with it as well. Everyone works far more than they are paid for, everyone wanders around sleep-deprived around First Assignment Handing-In Time, everyone accepts living in casual limbo for even over a decade waiting for a position to open up, everyone makes this "lifestyle choice" of spending more time with undergraduate essays than their partners or children.
...All while maintaining the fiction that we're more intelligent than the rest of society.