It's the first day of a new quarter. I am not prepared. I don't want to be prepared. I want to go home and bake brownies for my daughter's birthday party.
I have made a decision. This quarter I am not dressing professionally on teaching days. I am wearing jeans and sneakers. The students don't respect me anyway; I might as well be comfortable. I am also not holding scheduled office hours: no one ever comes.
Monday, March 27, 2006
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15 comments:
Definitely go with the jeans and comfy shoes!
No one comes to your office hours? What am I doing wrong?????
Oh, for tenure.
Sorrty the hear that( only for the office hours)
I'm an undergrad ( and a native French speaker, so excuse my grammar-spelling-lack of style) and in four years, i never quite understood why nobody ever go to office hours....Are students affraid of their professors?
I would definitly com to visit you!
But I think your right about cutting hours,if students need to see a teacher, they should be able to but also demonstrate some efforts. For example, work an appointment...and respect it.
I don't understand the office hour thing either. I had two classes last quarter, one with 85 students and one with 10. I never saw a single one of the 85 students, but the 10 came to see me frequently. I'm teaching the big course again, plus my usual big statistics class. I told them to just drop by any time, but call first to make sure I was in.
I'll let you know how it works.
Jeans and sneakers... is there any other way to dress. also, we, social scientists, are expected to dress like that. I;ve noticed that the worst dressed ever are the anthropologists (always looking like they just came back from the mountains or something) and the psych folks always dress real nice (to make it look like they're bigger scientists than the soc/anthro folks). :-)
And there are definitely dress patterns across units/schools (business dresses up, soc sciences dresses WAY down)
My colleagues in the business school don't teach at all. They get full teaching credit (and twice my salary) for their lab meetings.
Don't get me started.
There always is a sense of not wanting to start the new quarter/semester. Sigh. Certainly go for the jeans and sneakers! Yeah!
Well, here the soc sciences and humanities faculty are the only ones teaching a full load. Everyone else has labs as well. And the english faculty have *whiny tone* so many papers to grade that they get a reduced load (like we don't get papers to grade!)
!@#$ I got myself started!
I am not yet tenured..so I will keep my comments to myself.... Sufice it to say...there is a large inequity in course loads across the schools/divisions here also!!!!
Actually, I've never really understood what these office hours are all about. Have some coffee with the prof? A little chat? To go through the latest lecture?
would your office hour attendance improve if you stopped email? I've tinkered with not giving students my email (I'm only a TA, but still), and forcing them to go to office hours. I think it might help me get past the minutae of class (i.e., is there a quiz this week? do I need citations?) and make the consumer/student figure out college a little faster.
(there's a good NYT article on this from a couple of months ago: To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me from 2/21/06)
At my university a few years ago, some nubskull in the administration actually suggested that faculty be asked to fill out time sheets to verify that they were spending a certain number of hours in our offices (including but not exclusively office hours). In our faculty assembly, one of our tenured faculty announced to everyone's amazement that "I'm not going to 'punch in' like Fred Fucking Flintstone for this job. No fucking way."
It was glorious.
As for "dressing down" for class, I wholeheartedly support your decision. My wife describes my school-day attire as being part of something she calls "The Hobo Project." Fuck it. Who do I have to impress?
I'm all for dressing down for teaching. It is the philosophy that led me to dye my hair red and get my tongue pierced this semester. My students don't respect me anyhow. As for office hours - my department requires that I do them (as a TA). I have listed them as 'by appointment' and keep IM office hours. Students won't leave their dorm rooms but they do have questions. This also cuts down on the random e-mails.
I've read a study or two on the relationship b/n fashion and salary. In said scholarship (which i cite in an article that's being reviewed right now) people generally tend to think that those who dress in more formal attire (i.e. suits, shirts/ties, skirts) represent a career worthy of higher salaries. Those who dress more casually are not.
In addition, research has shown that people who dress more formally are viewed as more credible (though less friendly, less approachable), and those who dress in more casual attire are viewed as more friendly (though less friendly, less authoritative). These studies were conducted largely in academic settings.
It has seemed to me, as an observer at least, that dressing up means different things credibility-wise for different fields. An ecologist in a business suit loses cred while a molecular researcher in hiking boots looks like he is going fishing for the weekend. It is complex this academic fashion thing... haha
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