How are we all managing?

[ItalianHat]

It's the end of a 2nd week of teaching for me. Online is working OK - the students are saying they're already very tired though! I think it's about switching from the complete lack of structure of lockdown (for them - I was pretty busy!) back to timetables and starting seminars at 9am and so on.

And today's hollow laugh was an email from our IT managers which included the statement that: "IT staff are working into the evenings and at weekends to overcome the backlog of requests"

Tiny violins, please ...

It's of a level of clodhoppery that rivals an email sent to us from the teaching administrative staff manager in the June exams period, which told us that academic staff would have to do some time-consuming admin task, because professional staff "did not have space in their workloads."

I mean, I know everyone's working over & above, but why is it the academic staff who have to applaud everybody else (and do parts of their work for them), when we routinely work evenings & weekends.

Grrrrr.

But other than that - it's nice working with the students again, although online can be frustrating at times. However, I don't think it'd be any more frustrating than masked & at 2m distance, trying to run a seminar with desks & seats set out in socially-distanced rows.

Perhaps we could ignore the derailing and get back to the topic of the thread, which was about teaching in these difficult times? I find that when someone has signed up specifically to cause a bun fight with a group of people they evidently dislike it’s best to ignore.

To answer the question “how are we managing “ - not very well. I’m fed up of recording material and editing captions, I’m sick of people calling pointless meetings on Teams where normally they wouldn’t be able to find a meeting room so they would just make a decision themselves. I’m fed up of going to give seminars which are meant to be a mix of online and face to face only to find the face to face students haven’t turned up, so I’ve traveled to campus for nothing. I’m fed up that they have decided printers are a COVID hazard so we can’t print or scan anything (so bang goes my plan of annotating diagrams in those deserted seminars). I’m fed up of being told to sacrifice research time for teaching - I have a teaching and admin only contract and a far higher teaching load than my colleagues and no research time to sacrifice.I’m fed up of students emailing me with IT problems I can’t solve. I’m struggling with supporting student with serious mental health issues. I’m fed up of working a 50 hour week and being paid for 28. Seriously considering just calling it a day after 30 years.

Oh and I’m fed up of looking at my own increasingly tired and ageing face on these video lectures.

And another thing, I’m angry with whoever decided we should “take this opportunity “ to revise our curriculum so that all my teaching this semester is new material. Great idea to maximise work.

Chemenger you are not the only one who contemplated leaving this week. I'm hoping that it's just tiredness after the stress of the level 4 change, the hotspot outbreak on campus and the newness of everything. I really did start calculating my options (to live on very little) instead of carrying on. I'm not going to leave though, despite how stressful it is, it's good to have a stable job in a recession which many of my other friends don't have (when I say stable, I don't think there will be any redundancies this year.)

I don't do blended seminars, we were told not to do them unless you literally have one person who wants to join in remotely, the feedback we got was bad for everyone, and so I am doing Zoom seminars in addition to campus, but only one big one, not lots of little ones, so the workload increase is not great. I wouldn't double up everything, no need. I've noticed attendance at either face to face or Zoom is not quite as good as it should be for this point in the term.

Oh and I’m fed up of looking at my own increasingly tired and ageing face on these video lectures this, times a million. I'm going back to Zoom meetings recorded and will put the captions on after, I can't take Panopto's high definition of my chins any longer. Several of my colleagues just don't use cameras due to it, but I know the students do like a small thumbnail speaker from what they've told me, so I'm going to carry on with that.

We have to offer blended classes, repeated enough times that half the class can attend each week. They should be more examples classes than seminars; they are interactive but mostly watching me do something. I did three last week, for a total of five face to face students (one had nobody but me in the room). I think “we’re” hoping things will pick up a the term goes on, I’m hoping for lockdown so we can stop them.

@ComoTheFirst

No. An IT 'manager' gets a salary in line with the starting salary of a Junior Lecturer (who has no management responsilbities). 'Precarious'? You mean part time/ temp employment. Welcome to the world. And ask any office temp about 'Precarity'.

So, when you say 'no,' you mean 'yes'. Don't you?

A manager earns more than precariat staff.

There's no need to be patronising and dismissive of academics who are in temporary or part-time employment. This is a huge issue in academia at the moment. If you have somehow managed to miss the debates about it, feel free to google and educate yourself.

Have you been an office temp, by the way? I have. That's why I dislike punching down at people like this, or setting people against each other on the presumption they should work harder because someone else is being exploited.

"An IT 'manager' gets a salary in line with the starting salary of a Junior Lecturer (who has no management responsilbities)."

A junior lecturer does often have management responsibilities - leading research groups and supervising early career researchers. They also have to deal as tutors with students' serious mental health issues and other crises. A junior lecturer has leadership responsibilities in the context of their teaching. It is a different type of job than an IT manager, but this does not mean there aren't a wide variety of responsibilities inherent within it.

I've had those 'leadership responsibilities' without the junior lecturer salary, FWIW. And that's not unusual either.

I ran a medium-sized academic department on a bottom of the scale SL salary. It shouldn't happen, but it does.

I'm so tired - and another one thinking of quitting. In some ways, this would be easier for me as I am on a one-year contract anyway, so I could just stop applying for jobs for next year. But I really wanted this career (even with all the temporary employment hideousness) ... until recently.

I am not doing blended classes either - they just will not work in the spaces I'm doing f2f teaching in. I've been very honest with the students about this, and am running extra catch-up sessions for students who can't attend f2f. So that's yet more work.

I am also finding the experience of trying to teach around/at the same time as constantly talking to and supporting students who are sharing that they are ill or unhappy really draining and emotionally difficult. I don't think we should be putting them in this situation, and it is all starting to feel so surreal, in a bad way.

50% of the students in my Friday seminar group are now self-isolating. You'd think at this stage I'd be able to just move the seminar online but, no, apparently I have to sustain the charade of f2f teaching at all costs and certainly while half of the halls of residence are locked down. I expect I'll be sent into the classroom to talk to myself next week just so that the (mysteriously nowhere to be seen since students have arrived on campus) VC can say we are still offering f2f teaching.

I did three seminars yesterday, three in a row. One student physically present in the first, none in the second, one in the third. Plenty of questions but I could do without three hours on my feet (the camera can only see you if you’re standing). In compensation I then had a surgery hour with first years, who were all absolutely charming. Literally all over the world, USA, Thailand, China and isolation down the road. Lovely to speak to them one to one, I really miss just chatting with students.

I'm teaching one extra Zoom class per module, and swapped one face to face for Zoom, so everyone has a campus option and a Zoom option. It took us about 3 weeks of term to get to this model, but it's working reasonably well. My main worry is that many students are attending neither! I am concerned the usual attendance monitoring has stopped, I don't know if they are just happy to escape our attention or have worryingly dropped off the radar...

I wasn't very clear, I'm doing one extra hour of teaching a week which really isn't much given it's on Zoom. I'm still not amazing on Zoom though, I didn't realise if you played a video in screen share that it wouldn't share the sound...

We are given absolutely no choice over what we offer. I have sat in meetings where it’s been clear that academics are expected to just suck it up and do it.

I am lucky - I had a choice. I've been online since the start, but expect to be F2F next term. As someone with a high "Moderate" risk (age, underlying conditions) I think I'll feel a lot safer by then - I've seen how it works for colleagues & I'm confident my university has put in place requirements & arrangements which will keep us safe.

But my students are all saying how tired the are. I think it's probably not physical tiredness - more the drabness of the life we're all leading now.

I just try not to think about the future too much - just taking life day by day ... The future is just too tiring & depressing.

@Poppingnostopping I also have learned that you have to tick the 'use computer sound' box or whatever it is at the bottom before you screen share with videos! Learning curve.

Also getting the tiredness comments and yes, I think it's very much mental / psychological.

Feeling like almost getting into rythmn now, although it is tiring. I got a bit stroppy with management and told them I'm not coming to any meetings cos I can't fit it in my workload (that they've lumped onto me).

I'm wondering about tiers. We're possibly going to end up in tier 2. So we're OK to teach and students OK to come to class but I can't have lunch with colleague and students can't have lunch with each other. But nobody can police this can they?

So no matter what lockdown rules are, if everyone can go to work or education.. Can't quite see what good it will do much.

Life is baffling and tiring

We haven’t been able to have lunch with colleagues since March, really, at least not within the university. Not that we can have lunch with anyone outside our household, at the moment except maybe outside which, in October in Scotland, definitely comes under “only if desperate”. I have seen precisely three of my colleagues in the flesh since then, when we’ve had very distanced conversations in corridors. The university is largely deserted, it’s interesting to hear that other places my be more populated. Academics here are not routinely going in to the university, even those with experimental research are prioritising access for their postgrads rather than themselves. Admin staff are not in at all. I only go in on the day I have face to face teaching. I can barely imagine sitting down with a colleague. Our teaching rooms are very well set out with strict distancing, the closest I’ve been to a student is peering at their screen from the next desk with a mask on.

@ComoTheFirst

If the job is so bad *@Bellesavage* why do you do it? Are you really expecting sympathy in a world where loads of our fellow citizens are being paid minimum wage in the supermarkets, or cleaning your office?

I've worked in supermarkets for years and been a cleaner in the very institution I work for a year whilst I was studying. Maybe it's because I'm older now but I find my current role so much more grueling. I do it because I love research but the scale is tipping.

My university is responding to the outbreak on campus by selling Get Well Soon cards in its retail outlets. There is literally no situation which can’t be monetised.

I'm sticking my nose around the door just to mention that (as a somewhat fossilised undergrad moving from teaching myself) I sent an email to my course leader after the first week to thank all the staff for the task of basically reformatting our entire course into online-mainly mode for the year.

Yep we've had technical hiccups (and I fucking swear doom on the evil that is Blackboard Collaborate) and lecturers locking themselves into breakout rooms - which we've all just thought was hilarious (this little voice popping up in the chat box with "I'm stuck in room 3") but they've really pulled out all the stops. My gripes are with the IT that's struggling with the server load - which IS bollocks because they've had months to get that in order!

I now really need to know the shade of paint one of them has their kitchen wall though as I NEEDS it!

My gripes are with the IT that's struggling with the server load - which IS bollocks because they've had months to get that in order! I totally hear you, at my uni they did decide to solve this in the summer, but it was a huge job and ended up eating into teaching prep time so everything has been more chaotic at the start of term. So nice that you thanked your tutors. I have had a few appreciative messages, I think my students can see I'm trying my absolute hardest!