I have a proviso to add to my previous post, in which I wrote about the largely positive nature of having a substantial teaching load. This is - what else could it be? - a gripe about pay. Now during the previous years when I have taught just a couple of groups, the pay was largely irrelevant. The demands on my time, over the course of the year, were minimal, and though that £60 or so each month was welcome, I would probably have done it for free because the experience was so positive.

Now, though, I find myself in the unenviable but by no means uncommon of being an hourly-paid university teacher. The University and College Union have been campaigning about this for years, but I have always passed over the mutters and grumbles in my UCU magazine. I now realise what they were on about - indeed, you can consider this post my virtual placard.

I am paid at the rate of £30 per contact hour with each group, plus £30 for one hour's preparation per group. Not a bad wage, on the face of it. Until I worked out how many hours I actually have done, compared to how many I have been officially paid for. Totting up the hours I have spent in preparation for each tutorial, sitting in front of a computer making groovy handouts and thinking up exciting activities, I have done around 60 hours to teach six different modules. Though it's a bit hard to calculate, because my monthly salary is divided into twelve equal installments whereas the teaching is erratic depending on the times we arrange to meet over the year, I guess I'm probably being paid for only about one quarter of the time I actually put in. And, I should note, that this 60 hour estimate is just formal time when I have switched on the computer for the sole purpose of preparing a tutorial. It does not include all those accumulated minutes snatched on the bus or before bed at night when I have done the primary reading of the various novels and poems I am teaching. It does not include the incidental minutes when I have had to field email questions, or upload resources onto our online learning system. It does not include all the admin of printing, photocopying, and filling in absentee reports.

Finally, for those who haven't switched off after this petty rant, I want to add a note about employment rights in my "casual" teaching role. When I also started work in the university library, I had to churn through whole wads of paper relating to my pension contributions, health and safety, employment rights, mentoring, staff development opportunities and so on. Which is all very laughable, given that I spend twice as much time teaching as I do in my library job. For what passes for my teaching "contract," by contrast, I am technically not employed by the university. I can be dismissed without notice at any point in the year. I have no automatic right to a pension. I am not eligible to undertake any process of personal development, and receive no money to support my training. Worst of all, my library rights and computing access will in principle be withdrawn once I submit my thesis (although through a combination of luck and planning, my library role will still allow me these privileges, so I personally should not notice any difference).

The nail in the coffin is the fact that I am helpless in the face of all these contradictions. I realise that the teaching will ultimately pay off in the long run, as the experience will round off my CV so I can apply for proper academic posts next year. But any of the other postdocs (i.e. my friends) in my department no doubt realise this likewise. Were I to refuse to teach in protest, others would be only too happy to step into my shoes. Were I to kick up a fuss to the university big wigs, they would no doubt pressure my department simply to drop me.The only ray of enlightenment and glimmer of gold might be found in a recent report in my UCU magazine. This concerns hourly-paid teaching staff at Aberdeen (including postgraduates), whose concerns and frustrations seem remarkably similar to my own. But, having waved their painted placards at their university administration, they have had some success. In conjunction with the union, the University reached a new agreement with Teaching Assistants:

TAs are paid for 'sufficient hours to carry out their duties', including
marking papers and emailing students, and specifying that TAs are entitled to
pay progression for each year of experience. As this newsletter went to
press, TAs were being issued with contracts. Early indications are that in some
departments, the assessment of hours of work has increased by 40%, the number of
students in tutorials has been reduced to 2005 levels, and TAs will be paid to
participate in course reviews.

Labels: hourly paid, Postgraduate Diary, teaching

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have taken on a lot more teaching this year, having requested it back in those naive days of Summer sun when I assumed I would have submitted my thesis by September. As I said before, the combined load of teaching and research has put me under a lot of strain. However, unexpectedly, some positive things have come out of teaching many different groups across different modules, with a workload which is relatively representative of the normal lecturer's. My experience may well be typical of postgraduates moving from a very restricted teaching role of their PhD years, to more extensive duties post-doctorate. And although I am talking about my experience in an Arts' faculty, I am sure many of the same themes will occur to any new university teacher.

As three of my tutorials are on the introductory modules of the first-year English Literature degree, the main thing I have noticed is that the different modules have ideas and historical contexts which cut across them. So, for example, teaching on the early eighteenth-century novel, Robinson Crusoe, I tried to get my tutorial groups to explore the way in which the fact that Daniel Defoe was a Protestant may have informed his representation of Crusoe's spiritual epiphany on the island. Feeling that God must be punishing him for his youthful arrogance in leaving home, Crusoe reads the signs of a Providential God in the events that happen to him. He also embodies a Protestant work ethic, so that he does not expect to drop to his knees and find his prayers for deliverance being answered; rather, he must work for himself, in the process learning to farm and fabricate the food and tools he needs to survive, discoveries which form much of the novel's plot.

Now as some one who researches postmodern fiction, much of this religious context was comparatively new to me. And I was therefore glad that I gained a mutual insight from my work in teaching the poet, John Donne. Donne was born in 1571 of a Catholic family, in an England where Catholics could expect to be persecuted, totured and arrested. Having seen his brother die in prison for harbouring a Catholic priest, Donne was torn between the religious expectations of his family, and his ambitions to climb the career ladder of the civil service. Eventually, Donne did convert to Protestantism, preaching fierce sermons at St. Paul's Cathedral, and receiving the respect he craved. However, just as Crusoe is repeatedly anxious that God has got it in for him, Donne too is never quite sure of the theological ground he stands on. For Catholics, performing the expected rites is the way to reach closer to God; and what could be a better way to guarantee passage to Heaven than if one has been willing to die for the faith, as Donne's brother did? And what could be less certain than Protestantism, with its salvation through faith alone? How could Donne know how much faith is enough? How could he know that his personal reading of the Bible was done with enough conviction? That there are no guarantees in Protestantism, only questions and doubts, lies at the heart of Donne's poetry, which offers some of the most elegantly tortured verse in the English language.

As you can tell by this brief excursion through the religious detail of English literary history, this postmodernist scholar has got surprisingly engaged with this earlier material, and though it is by no means my usual field, I had the experience over the course of these two authors of conducting what felt like personally original research. Although I have always loved the unpredictable excitement of face-to-face teaching, and the feeling that I am actually doing something productive with my time, I have rarely had that buzz of discovery that I know from my PhD life. That energy, though, did start to flicker in my mind as I researched these general periods and ideas, rather than just particular texts to be taught on a single module.

In a different relationship between teaching and research, my own research into literary theory has, naturally, informed and guided my teaching on the module of that name. For example, whilst lectures on the canon discuss whether Shakespeare could ever be considered "bad" literature in a different culture or period, my own research into cybernetic fiction led me to ask the inverse question of my tutorial groups: can we imagine a time in the future when a computer-generated poem is considered to be "good" literature? And not only has my research helped my teaching here, my research has benefited from some of the esoteric background reading I had to do in order to teach the rest of the syllabus on this module. It is not quite a teach one module, get some research in for free; but the more teaching you do, the more likely it is that you will mutually accrue benefits on both sides of the teaching-research equation.

The other benefit of teaching more groups in more subjects is that I start to see the same faces and to build a relationship with students, rather than having them simply flicker into my life at certain periods, before then fading away again. If I know a student is particularly vocal in one class, but silent in another, I can start to guage where their particular interests and abilities lie. If a student writes one good essay, and one bad one, I can say more usefully specific things about where they need to improve, and where they are already doing well, because I have a relative understanding of how good they are overall.

Finally, and egocentrically, I am better able to evaluate my own teaching. If I have really engaged discussions with five groups for one module, then find the sixth to be comparatively silent and inert, I guess that it is probably not due to the content of the tutorial I have designed, but rather to the idiosyncrasies of the individuals in the sixth group. Conversely, if one group is very vocal in my tutorial for one module, but the same group seems quite quiet in the tutorial for a different module, I figure that either they are not so engaged with the subject matter of the latter, or - more likely - that I need to adapt my teaching style to fit with their predispositions and the ways they are responding to the different material.

So whilst we are all familiar with professorial grumbles about the teaching-research imbalance, it seems to me worth thinking about how more teaching can actually be a bonus, even if it does take up a remarkably disproportionate amount of time. Maybe I am at that naive stage when teaching is still exciting and new enough for me to feel pleasure in it; maybe, after fielding a whole load more emails asking when our next tutorial is or when a certain author died, I will have become a grumpily resentful of the claims on my research time that teaching makes. But hey, at least this arts' teacher can always escape to those desert islands in the mind, like Robinson Crusoe.

Labels: Postgraduate Diary, teaching

A friend of mine, a PhD student, commented recently on his frustration that his parents still ask him when he intends to get a real job. I know exactly how he feels. I have spent the last three years trying to convince my parents that, surely, starting writing at 9.00 and finishing writing at 5.00 or thereabouts is what they mean by "real work." I know from my gap year in this supposedly more concrete reality of paid work that office life often involves chatting, discussion, making phone calls and filling in paperwork mindlessly; and at the end of the day, office life ends the moment you kick back your desk chair, to begin your leisure time, usually using the money you have earned to pay for it. Surely it is the world of normal work that is the more unreal, requiring you to inhabit a split personality, acting and existing differently depending on whether you are before your family or your boss. I suspect that what parents everywhere mean by the "real" world is that within which there is some sort of oversight, chains of responsibility tying you to times and tasks that you must do, lest you get the sack.

But what could be stranger, less real, than this artificial system in which work and life are kept apart from each other by the glass of 9.00 and 5.00, and in which you may be responsible to managers who (apparently) do less useful work than yourself? By contrast, PhD life becomes your total reality: the mind you occupy whilst doing your PhD is, to a large extent, the only one you have. PhD life is solipsistic and demands total concentration; there are few opportunities to do mindless things like paperwork or phone calls, because by definition a PhD is the use of the mind and the application of the pen or keyboard, not casual chat or filling in time sheets. You eat, sleep and breathe your thesis. The PhD is with you when you shower. It creeps into your consciousness just when you are drifting off to sleep. And it waits at the end of the bed to welcome you with the crack of dawn. So the call to all parents everywhere has to be: "get real." Doing a PhD is probably the hardest work anyone can do, because it is so self-driven and so intimate to the cells of brain and body whilst doing it.

But there comes a stage towards the end of their PhD when most researchers find that the PhD finds a way to press itself even into those precious cracks of time still, wistfully, called "time off." Most significantly, of course, is the need to complete by a certain deadline. But there is also the fact that after three years, funding will dry up (if you have been lucky enough to have some in the first place), and researchers will need to start looking for temporary jobs and long-term futures, those entities that allegedly belong to the parental "real" world.

Now at this stage in may career, I realise how naive I was ever to believe that a PhD was "hard" work. For at this point I find myself holding down six different jobs or positions, some of them paid and some of them voluntary. In addition to trying to polish off the last few footnotes and dropped apostrophes of my thesis, I have been allocated to teach across five different modules. I asked for this amount of teaching back in the glorious days at the start of summer, when I naively imagined I would have finished researching by September. Now, though, I am essentially trying to do all the reading and lectures for an undergraduate degree, whilst adding the PhD on top of that. In addition, I've got a larger than normal pastoral tutor group in my college, have started a job in the library three evenings a week, and am working as publicity officer for my department. In an unpaid capacity, I'm editor of a journal, volunteering for our local literature festival, and moonlighting for Graduate Junction.

These days, I seem to jump from one thing to the next, like an errant fly alighting on one subject only for a moment, before something else calls. I am living and working minute by minute, squeezing in research in the odd half hour between ending library shifts and the bus back home, reading the poems I will teach the next day on that same vibrating vehicle, or doing teaching admin and photocopying first thing in the morning, before my email inbox comes alive. I am stressed and tired. But in an unexpected way, I also feel peculiarly satisfied with my work to a degree that I have not been over the previous three years of doing pure research. Now, for the first time since my year out in the "real world" of an office job, I start to tick things off on a daily basis. Tasks get done, and the list of things still to do gets smaller (at least until another head of the email hydra glowers from my refreshed inbox). With a PhD being as it is, you never feel quite finished, and at the end of the day, no matter how superficially productive, you never feel quite as if you have worked enough or to a sufficient standard. Now, though, I find myself to be a doer, a finisher. People task me with jobs, I work through them, and move on to something else. So it is this sort of experience that outsiders or parents probably mean by the "real," the mentality of the production line and the in-tray out-tray with which they are familiar. So what, I wonder, could be better or more real, more productive and more satisfying, than finally completing my bloody PhD?

Labels: PhD, Postgraduate Diary