Friday, October 22, 2010

Gah.

The last stages of carrying my daughter are not fun. The constant, nagging aches, lingering nausea, and inability to sleep can fuck right off. So can the fear that she won't be any more patient than her brother, and decide to come early enough to not be able to come home when I do. So can work stress.

On top of all of that, my university is trying to take class autonomy away from online professors. They're saying that they want to make the online classes more uniform, and that all we have to do is come up with a department wide syllabus, a schedule of what we want to teach, and send it and any handouts to them, and they'll design the course for us.

That may be all well and good for new profs that have never taught online before, but I have. I've been teaching online for two years, and my department head says I'm the department's best online teacher (I tend to revise and rework what doesn't work for the students on a weekly basis). I do not need someone taking my class away from me because others won't bother to fix what's wrong with their course.

So, my last FFO is this: glorified technology administrators that have delusions of adequacy and feel the need to prove that they're more than glorified technology administrators can definitely fuck off. Hell, I'll even help them pull their heads out of their asses so that they can.

I don't need this shit. If that goes through, I may not be teaching next fall. Which will suck in many, many ways--beyond losing the money, I'll be losing the a job that I truly love doing.

1 comment:

ricki said...

Stand tough, HH. We've been through the "we must make Gen Ed courses more UNIFORM!" fight. My argument being, if they really want them uniform, hire one person to teach all sections of the same course - and free the rest of us for teaching the upper-division courses.

People who meddle in profs' ability to teach the way that works best for them and for their students, in the name of "uniformity" or political correctness or what the hell ever, can FTFO.

As can meddling administrators who want to micromanage us down to the times when we can go and take a leak. Go back to the classroom! Spend some of your time teaching! Then we can talk about what additional duties we should have added on. YOU HAVE NO CONCEPT OF WHAT TEACHING IS LIKE ANY MORE, and for that matter, you have no concept of what SCIENCE teaching is like, where we have labs that we get 1 credit hour for, even though we are in labs for 2 hours, and we may spend up to an hour before and an hour after setting up and breaking down.

Feeling overworked all the time can FTFO as well.