Accounting for Time

Kean University is requiring faculty to fill out time sheets to prove to administrators that they work at least a 35-hour week.

Feh.

First of all, most of the faculty I know work at least a fifty-hour week. And most of us work seven days a week. I'm going to attempt to keep a time sheet for the next seven days, starting with getting up this morning to check email.

This will tell me how many hours I really spend working this week, but it will also be interesting to document how work saturates my life. The New York Times attributes this to technology like the Blackberry, but I remember my parents--also college professors--working nights and weekends through the 1970s (when I was a kid at home) and I know they continued to do so until they retired.

I started off this morning with ten minutes checking email, answering messages from a couple of students who didn't make an in-class essay yesterday to try to set up times for both to make up the work.

Also on the agenda for today: grading and writing detailed feedback on the essays, which the students will revise at home; re-reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and chapter 2 of Lawrence Buell's The Future of Environmental Criticism for discussion in class tomorrow; and revisions to "Research In Progress," an annual report for the Old English Newsletter.

Plus I'll attend what looks like to be a long meeting of the Graduate Studies Committee at which we'll review various curricular changes for graduate programs across the university, and then lead a workshop for undergraduate students interested in going to graduate school.

Yes, a long day. And tomorrow morning I start over.