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by endtime 5534 days ago
The point of that part of my comment wasn't to issue a who-was-busiest challenge (though I'm pretty sure I'd win such a challenge, against either the OP or any of the profs I was TAing for), but to say that long hours grading and regrade requests are to be expected, and especially that the latter are not just the result of unreasonable expectations on the part of the students. Grading is not always fun, but that's why someone gives you money to do it.

And even though it's apples to oranges, I'll state for the record if I hadn't been taking three classes, working on my startup (which I launched during school), and (one quarter) interning at NASA, I think I would easily have had time to put together and deliver lectures in addition to the office hours/recitations/review sessions I was holding, problem sets I was grading, exams I was helping write, robots I was admining, class logistics I was organizing, and whatever else happened to fall under the umbrella of my TA duties any given week.
1 comments
scott_s 5534 days ago
Sure, if you had not been doing all of those other things, you would have had time for the remaining duties of a teacher. But you wouldn't have time for much else. And you're thinking of a work week in the same way that a grad student, professor or startup founder does: work all the time. Which brings us back to the point of the original article: if we're going to expect people to put in that much time and effort, perhaps we should pay them more to compensate.
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endtime 5534 days ago
I said in my comment that I think teachers should be paid more. I can think that and also think that the complaints in the comment to which I was replying were unreasonable.

>Sure, if you had not been doing all of those other things, you would have had time for the remaining duties of a teacher. But you wouldn't have time for much else.

Again, it's beside the point, but actually I think I would have had time for quite a lot else. Do you really think working for NASA, starting your own company, and being a full time grad student at once take up the same amount of time as preparing and delivering a couple lectures a week?

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scott_s 5534 days ago
I took the complaints not as "these are unreasonable expectation of a teacher," but as "these are unreasonable expectations of someone who is paid as little as teachers are."

As to your final question, to quote my freshmen year English professor, "Anything is hard if you do it well." The course I had in mind was relatively new, and as such its contents were in flux. The projects and lecture material were under constant revision. If the professors for the course I TAed had had the TA responsibilities as well, they would have had time for little else but the course.

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