Time management in Academia: Balancing teaching and research

Spring 2014 is my first semester in which I have a full course load to teach - and from now on, I'll (most likely) be teaching 3 courses in Spring and 3 courses in Fall. This semester. I'm teaching 3 new courses - courses that I'm developing from scratch for the students at USFQ.

As we saw earlier, it takes about 4 hours to prepare an hour's worth of lecture. Since I'll be teaching 9 hours a week, that puts me already at 45 hours a week (1 hour teaching + 4 hours preparing => and this 9 times a week). Add in some time for grading, and regular admin stuff, and replying emails, and you can imagine that my time is running out quickly.

And all of that is just teaching - what truly matters, on the tenure-track, in my field, for my institution and for my overall career, are my publications. I made an ambitious schedule for churning out a large number of journal papers based on the novel elements in my dissertation (and the massive amount of test data that we produced), but I'm already experiencing that, even though everything is written in my dissertation, it takes more time to write the papers.

With a number of papers in the submission process as well, I forgot to keep time and space in my planning to deal with the comments of the reviewers. Overall, I'm now slowing down from initially wanting to submit a paper per month of 1,5 months to a paper per 2 or 3 months.

Nonetheless, given my part-time appointment in Delft, I want to carve out at least 10 hours per week for research and writing. Ideally, I'd love to up that number to at least 20 hours per week, but I'm afraid that will be hard in my first semester.

As I was scratching my head, and wondering how to fit teaching and research into my schedule (and still find time to eat, play music, play with my cat, given some attention to my husband, exercise, meditate, read for pleasure, sleep at least 8 hours per night, maintain this blog and explore this country), I turned to Twitter for advice. You can find the Storify of the tweets at the bottom of this post.

The main take home message from the tweets was to plan time for writing. This advice closely corresponds to the idea of making the weekly template, as I saw earlier on the blogs of Tanya Golash-Boza and Raul Pacheco-Vega.

As such, I made a weekly template for myself. Over time, I'm planning to change this template in line with ideas from Alisa Vitti's monthly cyclic approach (as outlined in her book WomanCode) and Laura Vanderkam's 168 hours mathematics (see 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think). I'm also planning some trials of writing first thing in the morning, from 6am to 8am, as well as going to the gym first thing in the morning.

Taking into account my previous reservations, and highlighting that this schedule is in its experimental face, I'm here sharing my current weekly template.

Scheduling class preparation time

As I've started my new job at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, I got 3 courses assigned to teach in the Spring semester. Three new courses to teach means three new courses to prepare - which initially sounded like a ton of work to me.

For reference, the first lecture I ever taught took me roughly 30 hours to prepare. No way I can spend 15 hours per hour of class when I'm teaching 9 hours of class per week...

To figure out how much time I should schedule, and get a realistic idea of what to expect next semester, I turned to the Biggest Oracle of our World aka the internet.

First of all, I stumbled upon this great resource from University of Chicago on preparing to teach. This document takes you step-by-step through the process of preparing a new course: from the moment you put your syllabus together to the actual delivery of your class.

Then, I found that the American Faculty Association discusses the topic of class preparation time very directly. They give 2 to 4 hours of preparation time as a rule of thumb. My planning is happy with getting a real estimate of the required time.

I also learned (not really to my surprise) that, as with everything, there is a law of diminishing returns for class preparation time. The more time you plan to spend preparing, the more time it will take up. We know that from PhD research too. The guideline from this resource is "Two hours for new lectures and half an hour for lectures you've given before is a good guideline". The authors of the article suggest a "mean and lean" approach to preparing for your class - and I am planning to follow this approach.

Finally, I turned to Twitter to get advice from more experienced lecturers. Many times, 4 hours of preparation for a new class is coming up. The Storify of this discussion is here at the bottom of this post.

In conclusion: I'm scheduling 4 hours of preparation per class. As suggested in the "mean and lean" approach, I am subdividing that into the following activities:
45 minutes to read the class material
45 minutes to distill all important information
15 minutes to outline the class hour
45 minutes to construct the argument around the "what if" question
45 minutes to prepare an example and possible homework
45 minutes right before class to make some slides with figures that are complicated to draw on the blackboard, or pictures from practice, and to revise all material.

Five Lessons for Science Teachers

Flickr Image under CC license by ceolm

Teaching science, especially to teenagers, should be an opportunity to share our love for science with curious and young people. But too often teachers simply end up boring their students to death. (I, too, dreaded the science classes in school and just rolled into engineering because I enjoyed solving math riddles).

But in his TED talk, Tyler DeWitt shows us how to teach science, and make it fun. From his short presentation, there are four lessons for all of us that love science and want to share this love with possible future scientists.

1. Avoid jargon.

you should avoid jargon at all times when you talk about your research or interests to friends, family or students. I'd even say that you'd better avoid as much jargon as possible when you talk to other experts, because we all have very narrow and deeply defined fields of research.

2. Science is fun.

We know that science is fun. Now it's our turn not to keep that little secret to ourselves. Nature is beautiful and filled with smart hacks. Our inventions can go beyond our imagination. Asking "What if?", drawing connections and simply playing in the sandbox are all vital parts of science. That's the story we should tell young children.

3. Show your enthusiasm.

If you are passionate and enthusiastic about your field of expertise, then it's completely OK to overflow and express this feeling to others. One of the brilliant parts of Tyler DeWitt's talk is the absolute joy he seems to find in talking about bacteria and viruses. If I'd have had someone with so much zeal in front of me in school, I would have listened.

4. Tell a story.

It's OK to simplify an explanation, as long as the gist of the idea is crystal-clear to the audience and learners. Telling a story, creating analogies and relating concepts from science to situations from everyday life are all different ways to grab the attention, to build eagerness to learn and to foster curiosity.

5. Display visual information.

Another brilliant part in Tyler's story are the simple, yet clear drawings that he uses. These drawings tell students so much more than a few lines of text. Visuals bring our stories to life, and that is exactly one of our goals in the classroom.

Here, you can watch Tyler DeWitt's talk:

Why Blogging is for Every Single Academic

In my vision of the future, blogging is as much a part of the academic world as peer-reviewed journal articles.

There are several reasons for blogging, and blogging as well as more online sharing, could tackle publication bias.

But at the same time, I notice a lot of reluctance when it comes to blogging. Two years ago at the PhD Event, the Online Networking and Social Media workshop ended up in a long list of complaints and reasons why to stay away from the Big Scary Interwebz. This year, the workshop I intended to give at the Network Day of Utrecht University had 0 interested persons.

So, scholars 2.0 should acknowledge the fears and doubts of their less-internet-oriented peers and address these fears more specifically.

I'm giving you my 2 cents here, hoping that I can spark some interest in doubting academics:

1. Privacy

Online identity protection and concerns with regard to privacy are a major concern. However, if you are active online, you really have more control over your online identity than when you try to fully stray away. In a way, if you try to avoid to have anything about you or your work online, you fully depend on others who might still distribute content that contains your name.

If privacy, or not publishing of your contact information, is your main concern, then you can think deeply in advance on how much of your data you want to provide when you write something. The key here is to always think twice when you fill out a form online and check if your data will not be shared with others.

2. Fear for writing something "stupid"

A fear I can fully relate to... In the past, I've deleted complete blogs (like the blog I kept on my MySpace), because I didn't like the contents anymore. I've also wondered if it can happen that I write something about my research, which then would venture out into the interwebz and lead a life of its own, grow teeth and come and bite my in the ankles.

However, if it turns out I wrote something that turns out to be discredited by other research, I'd be more than willing to discuss it here. Sharing knowledge leads to advancing the entire body of knowledge, and I prefer to write, and fail if necessary, than to keep my thoughts to myself.

3. Lack of time

We're all more than busy: research, education, administrative tasks, preparing a trip for a conference and some more activities all keep our schedules more than full. However, when you consider starting to write online as a blogger, you should reflect before you start. If you don't have the time to keep a blog alive, having your own website or blog might not be the way to go for you.

But that doesn't mean blogging wouldn't be suitable for you! There are many ways in which you can still contribute online, even though you don't have the time for your own page: you can guest blog, or your faculty or research group might start a blog in which all involved researchers can take turns and provide content when their schedule allows them.

4. Lack of ideas

Another commonly-heard grumble is "I don't have good ideas to write a post". You don't really need to sit with a coffee and cook up a Great Idea. There are many ways in which you can share your knowledge online. In this post, you can find a few ideas on which contents you can quickly turn into a post. I'd add to that, writing a post to discuss a conference you visited, to share a presentation you gave (slides and a brief summary), write an entry when you have a new publication and -specifically for PhD students- giving an update of your work every now and then.

How would you convince a fellow academician to take the plunge and write online?

Assisting assignments

During the 4th quarter of the year, an important course of our research group is taught. Part of the course is a case study which the students have to carry out. The task of us PhD students is to assist students with their cases.

Since I am very busy starting a new series of tests and delivering all the reports from my first large series of tests (127 in total), I've been forced to streamline my procedures as much as possible with regard to assisting students.

I benefit from the fact that I have been assisting this course last year as well, and I had more time available to dedicate to my teaching duties. However, I still want to deliver the same results to the students and make sure they learn from the exercise.

Here's how I've been trying to streamline this task:

1. Have a clear workflow scheme

For all teams which I am assisting, I've made it clear how I prefer to work. I let them know that I prefer to:
- schedule appointments beforehand and if possible, I try to batch them together in one afternoon to keep my mind focused on the subject),
- to receive written material at least one workday before the meeting so that I can have a first impression of what needs to be improved
- have students neatly prepared for the meeting, and prepare myself as well for the meeting (fair enough, I'd say).

2. Know the common errors

From talking to senior PhD students and lecturers, I've been able to identify a few typical mistakes. I start by checking if the plots and graphs in the report "make sense", and then I check if the common errors have been made. If all this looks good, I can proceed and look at the report into further detail. If I can spot weaknesses early on, I know that I can point these out for the students but I don't need to go over the details of the report.

3. Schedule undisturbed chunks of time to correct

I've tried to grade reports in the middle of the day, while people are walking in and out of my office and I need to run up and down the stairs to the lab a few times. The result is that spend too much time trying to find my train of thought again. I've now made it a habit to read the reports either before 9am, after 4pm or from home.

4. Keep the pace of the students

I'm preparing the material at the same pace as the fastest group of students. I haven't prepared the entire case before it was even handed out (at least, not in detail, I did read through the assignment and an example solution before starting to get the general idea). While I'm checking the report of the fastest group of students, I spend some more time on the topic to be fully prepared to explain it again.

I'm planning to write about my method of approaching this matter again around this time next year to see if I've changed much of my ways...

The alliteration in the title is to keep the spirit of my previous post alive