I like advising students about research. My teaching has not been so good in the past. Would I make it in a 4-4?
How does a 4-4 feel like
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I teach at a 4-4.
A 4-4 feels like being on a teaching treadmill. You are constantly teaching, prepping, grading, answering emails, and doing so many teaching-related menial tasks that finding the time to work on your research is difficult. Even when you technically have the time, you are so exhausted from doing the teaching that you don't have the mental energy to focus and work on your research.
If you have a publishing team, you can make a research career work while at a 4-4. If you are working alone and don't have a team of researchers whose coattails you can ride, it's going to be tough to get your work done and published.
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what if you have been doing that for years and got used to the stream? Still mind-boggling?
I teach at a 4-4.
A 4-4 feels like being on a teaching treadmill. You are constantly teaching, prepping, grading, answering emails, and doing so many teaching-related menial tasks that finding the time to work on your research is difficult. Even when you technically have the time, you are so exhausted from doing the teaching that you don't have the mental energy to focus and work on your research.
If you have a publishing team, you can make a research career work while at a 4-4. If you are working alone and don't have a team of researchers whose coattails you can ride, it's going to be tough to get your work done and published. -
what if you have been doing that for years and got used to the stream? Still mind-boggling?
I teach at a 4-4.
A 4-4 feels like being on a teaching treadmill. You are constantly teaching, prepping, grading, answering emails, and doing so many teaching-related menial tasks that finding the time to work on your research is difficult. Even when you technically have the time, you are so exhausted from doing the teaching that you don't have the mental energy to focus and work on your research.
If you have a publishing team, you can make a research career work while at a 4-4. If you are working alone and don't have a team of researchers whose coattails you can ride, it's going to be tough to get your work done and published.It is still pretty difficult, assuming you are the kind of person who takes teaching seriously and doesn't just phone it in when it comes to lectures and grading. If you're updating your slides and keeping up with the latest research, it is very time consuming. If you actually read the student papers before grading them, it takes a lot of time. Some professors don't even assign papers because they don't want to spend the time grading.
Teaching a 4-4 takes a lot out of an academic who does it properly. That's the reason people say it is a publishing killer. It doesn't have to be a publishing killer if you have a team you can depend on to do most of the work and put your name on papers as a co-author, which happens a lot. However, my comments are based on the assumption that we are talking about a professor who doesn't have a team and has to conceptualize and produce papers alone.
And let's not even talk about the professors who teach 4-4 and have several new preps...
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Depends on your preps. I am on a 3-4. I trade one course for even worse service that I would rather trade for nine courses.
If two of them are new preps, it’s rough. If it’s four sections of intro and you’ve taught it 10 times,,m smooth sailing.
All the rest are options in between.
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Dedicate a set amount of time to new preps (e.g. 3 hours a week for each new class). And, don't go over that amount of time.
Do
Not
Go
Over
That
Amount
Of
TimeDitto!
Teaching a 4-4 can be manageable if you have two online preps each semester that you automate as much as possible. But honestly, a 4-4 is not fulfilling if you enjoy research. You will constantly be annoyed at how much time you waste on classes with little payoff.
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4-4 also comes with a ton of service and committee expectations, even for junior faculty. More and worse for juniors, if anything.
This is another aspect of a 4-4 not talked about enough. The service and committee expectations for junior faculty would make faculty at R1s collapse. It’s a really difficult job. When you see profs at R1s bragging about their research productivity when they have a team of co-authors for every paper, 15 TAs for two classes, and all the support you can dream of, you know they probably couldn’t survive a 4-4.