The academic balancing act
Life as a graduate student involves balancing three main activities:
- Academic work (coursework, area exam preparation, or researching and writing your thesis or dissertation)
- Teaching
- Professionalization (conferences, workshops, presentations)
During your graduate degree a rough percentage ratio to keep in mind for these is 60:30:10, although of course the ratio will vary somewhat depending on the time of year or what stage you're at in your degree.
Your teaching hours
The recommended average amount of time per week that you should spend on teaching is ten hours. That number, however, is only an average: there will be weeks when the amount of time you spend on teaching may be relatively small, and other weeks when the amount of time you spend will likely be greater. There may be weeks when you’re putting in extra time to mark a set of assignments, but you will also be getting paid the same amount at the beginning of term when the marking load is lighter or in the final weeks after you're done marking final assignments.
The department has undertaken time tracking studies with its TAs in both ENGL 109 and ENGL 210F, and the studies have shown that the 140 hours allotted for a regular TAship should be sufficient for you to complete your work. In most cases the course coordinator will give you a marking schedule with suggested marking times for each assignment. If you find you are unable to complete your marking within the suggested times or are having other time management problems, contact your course coordinator or the TA Coordinator to discuss strategies that will allow you to mark and manage your teaching tasks more efficiently.
Strategies for managing your workload
There are a number of strategies you can use to effectively manage your teaching load:
Determine the overall workload schedule for your term
At the beginning of term, map the deadlines associated with the course you’re teaching against the deadlines of the courses you’re taking. Determine where your crunch points are in all your courses and note where they overlap. Remember as well that students will likely want to consult with you more just prior to the due date for an assignment. See if you can make some adjustments in when you do presentations or when you work on your own assignments in order to distribute your overall workload for the term more evenly.
Work regularly on your teaching tasks
Putting in regular hours on your teaching, particularly in online courses, will help prevent more intense crunches later.
Manage your electronic communication wisely
Email can take up a huge amount of time. It's generally more effective to schedule a set period each day during which you reply to email, as opposed to letting email communication interrupt your other work throughout the day. See the CTE’s Timesavers for electronic communication for other strategies to manage your inbox.
Focus your comments and feedback
You may feel that you need to comment on everything in every assignment, but this is neither feasible for you nor helpful for your students. Concentrate instead on the main points or objectives of the assignment or on the most important things the student can do at a given stage to improve his or her work.
You want to include enough feedback to allow the student to improve their work, but if there are too many comments, the student may not be able to sort out which are most important, and you may find yourself spending far more time marking than is needed. Also, adjust the degree of commenting to the stage of writing--it isn't productive to do extensive copy editing on sections in early drafts that might subsequently be deleted, so give global comments instead.
Consult with your course coordinator or the TA Coordinator
If you are having trouble marking assignments within the recommended times, consult with your course coordinator or the TA Coordinator about marking strategies that will allow you to be more efficient.
For more information on effective commenting practices, see Teaching and responding to writing and the CTE’s Responding to writing assignments: managing the paper load.