Recently in schedule Category

Well the Spring 2009 semester is winding to a close. I was telling a colleague one thing I really missed when I first went to work after graduating from college was the cycle of semesters. As a teacher, I love working on my syllabi and getting psyched about the coming semester. Then there's the fun of meeting your students and getting to know them. But then things never quite go as you plan. I usually plan too much and can't get to it all. Every semester I tell myself to leave some catch up days, but then I get too ambitious and don't want to give up the time. Which backfires. You would think I would learn!

As the chair, it seems I'm  just as busy now as during the rest of the semester. I am looking forward to May and hoping that it will help stem the ongoing flood of emails. There are a lot of awards dinners and luncheons to go to at this time of year. Those are fun, especially because these events give me lots of chances to brag to IUP administrators about how great the English department is. But those meeting all take up time. And now we are into monitoring fall enrollments, hiring temporary faculty, and doing some end of the year reporting. The work keeps coming. Just as well, though, since the sun hasn't been out much in Indiana until today. But it's supposed to be in the 80s this weekend, so I'll try to get out for a walk with my family.

Well this week I was finally able to complete the Fall 2009 schedule for our department. Mostly...I figured out class schedules for the tenure track faculty first off. I tried as much as possible to keep the temporary faculty and teaching associate schedules unchanged from the previous fall. Though that's not totally possible to do. We try to give everyone a schedule that gives them maximum control over their time. So most people in the department teach a MWF or TR schedule, unless they prefer 5 days per week. I stuck to that basic principle in figuring out the schedule.

I also did my best to give people the courses they wanted. That was a lot trickier. Because we have a large department, we offer a lot of majors courses. So I was able to give most people a majors course and their choice for liberal studies courses. Liberal studies are our 3 required English courses for all IUP students. We have 2 composition courses which are required: English 101-College Writing and English 202-Research Writing. We also require students to take English 121-Humanities Literature. All of these courses give the chair lots of room to match liberal studies classes with majors courses and other responsibilities (graduate courses, release time, and directorships) to create schedules that provide time for faculty to handle their scholarly and service responsiblitiies.

But that's a lot to juggle when you have 58 tenure track faculty and about 300 classes to line up. And that leaves out the concern over particular classroom spaces which I left to the secretary, bless her heart, to figure out.

I did notice that as I worked on the schedule, I gained a better sense of our curriculum as a whole. As a faculty member, I would think about the classes I had to teach and how they related a bit to other classes. But I was pretty independent. As chair, I had to think about the linkages. So I had to try not to put writing courses at the same time as other writing courses for fear this would cut out interested students for one of the two classes. I am a composition scholar, so I also had to beef up on my knowledge of the literature side of our house. I got help on this from our Bachelor of Arts Program Director, but I also had to myself see what courses might compliment each other, what to pick when only one literature course could run from a group, and what times of day might attract the most students to less popular courses. So the global curriculum part of the process was quite interesting to me, but also one more thing to learn.