The 40-Hours-A-Week Adjunct

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Syllabus Writing Brings Out the Worst

I think I’ve finally figured out that the worst part of syllabus construction isn’t even figuring out what to assign when, what to cut, what to keep — it’s that I turn into a weird design junky when I’m writing the final document. Do all the indents match? Is everything appropriately spaced? Would this be better in a table? With shaded rows? Is a hollow bullet point more appropriate?

The finishing touches take me forever and inevitably just lead to heartache the next day when I notice a new, awkward space on page 3. It cuts me more than the missing comma on page 2.

A bad habit: Using other teachers for feedback

I’ve realized a bad habit of mine. I often turn to my partner, also a college instructor, and say the following: “Does this make sense to you?” Inevitably, I then show him an assignment or a set of instructions, and usually, he says, “Yeah, that’s totally clear.”

The problem, of course, is that my classes are populated not by English-major professors but by just-starting college students. Things that click for me, or for C, do not automatically come across very clearly for my students.

One of the ways one of my departments has proposed to combat this trouble is to allow/encourage teachers to send their syllabi and assignments to another faculty member with some experience in “grade leveling.” The idea is that she’ll read your papers and tell you what “level” they’re written at. I like this idea, in a way, and I did send my papers off (though did not receive a response), but I also think it may, again, be a circular, insular process.

Far better, probably, would be to hand out syllabi and let students edit and reword them (without changing the content) until they make sense to them.

Oh. Hey. First day activity?

Late Work Rules

I’m reviewing and revising my syllabi for the next term (which begins Monday). This shouldn’t take much work, but it always does because I always end up tinkering with things. The policy I have in mind to change this term is my late work policy. For several years, my late work policy has been one of the most forgiving policies around. Basically, I accept late work — any late work — with no penalty if a student contacts me before the deadline (even the morning of) to request an extension. I take late work otherwise with a 10 percent penalty within a week of the deadline. I do this because I see three main reasons to penalize late work:

1. Late work inconveniences, mostly, the instructor. Since I’m always grading something, it’s not usually much of an inconvenience for me to receive a new paper at a later date. I also don’t really want to punish students for making me work harder, since there are sometimes stretches where they’re working very hard and I’m twiddling my thumbs.
2. Late work offers a student an unfair advantage (of time) over students who submit their work on time. Yes, it does — but this seems to even out in the fact that it puts students who turn in late work at a disadvantage on the next assignment they turn in, for which they’ll have less time. Also, because the late option is available to everyone, I don’t think it’s inherently unfair.
3. Late work demonstrates a student’s unwillingness or inability to prioritize or meet deadlines. Perhaps this is true, in some cases, but I have two problems with this. First, if a student can contact me in advance and admit that he/she can’t finish his/her assignment on time, that is a form of recognizing limits, and I want to reward that honesty. Second, I bristle at the idea that my job should include explicit instruction in time management, in part because it is so often expressed as a “desirable job trait,” and I do not work as a teacher to better prepare students for jobs. That is what on-the-job training is for.

I do, however, work as a teacher to help students succeed further in their academic career, and time management is a necessary skill for academic success. To this end, I’m not sure my policy is very effective, and I sometimes worry that students come out of my class feeling they’ve gotten away with something by turning in late work. This is usually not true. My one best reason for accepting work past the deadline is that my actual goal in every class is to encourage students to learn certain skills and make their best effort at every assignment. Often, for some students, an extension of a week can mean the difference between turning in a D paper that’s dashed off the night before and that neither of us really understands and a B paper that’s taken enough work that the student actually manages to imbibe some of what I’m trying to pass along.

Sometimes, of course, that week-long extension just leads to a student writing a paper in one night one week later than they would have. Are they getting away with something then? No: that paper still gets graded as it would have. (It is those papers, though, that make my quick dismissal of the inconvenience feel very thin). 

Anyway, this term, I’m probably moving to a one-late-paper pass system instead of the old way. This is mostly because I’ve seen too many students now sink too far behind once they’ve turned in a first late paper. I’m not terribly pleased with this policy, though. I’d welcome any other good ideas on how to deal with delays.