My wife offers zero sympathy whenever I’m stressed-out about my job. She loves to quote some unnamed study that (she says) scientifically determined that being a “college professor” is the least stressful job in the universe. My usual response, borrowed from a fellow music department colleague, is “not if you’re doing it right.” Still she remains non-plussed.
But in all seriousness, I do find my job to be somewhat stressful. Certainly more stressful than it may appear from the outside. And here I’m defining “outside” to mean anyone who has never taught at a community college. You see, we have a lot of friends who are tenured faculty at four-year colleges. And I guess they do seem pretty relaxed about their job. (The only time they ever expressed concern about their job was when the topic of tenure review came up.) Which is not to say that teaching at a four-year college is easy, but it certainly appears to be less stressful than what I do.
So, this week I’m trying to take a critical look at what I do on a day-to-day basis and figure out why I feel a lot of stress. And what I’ve realized is that we community college faculty wear many more hats (so to speak) than other individuals that work in education. There’s the obvious stuff like teaching classes, developing curriculum, and working on committees. Many if not all educators have to deal with that stuff. But show me a full-time instructor in any other segment of education that has to deal with the range of issues that we confront at community colleges on a daily basis.
For example, every quarter I’m in a state of sheer terror as I watch the enrollment numbers for my classes. Like most community colleges, we have an enrollment minimum of 20 per class, and it’s not always easy to hit that number. I have some classes that do blockbuster enrollment, which makes my life a bit easier. But several of my classes are either new or more specialized and struggle to hit 20. As a result, I do a lot of marketing for those classes: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, an email list, and good old-fashioned networking. You can probably guess that I don’t really want to be doing all that stuff. But I feel that it reflects poorly on myself and my program if a class is canceled. That fear of embarrassment is a pretty strong motivator. At least for me. It’s a bit frustrating to hear my colleagues at four-year universities discuss their upper-division classes that run with single-digit enrollment (not to mentioned graduate-level courses). There are no upper-division classes in community college (with a few exceptions), so I simply don’t have that luxury. Perhaps some day I’ll be able to run classes based on the average enrollment across all of my courses, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Another hat I wear is to develop online curriculum for almost all of my classes. Even the classes I teach on-campus typically have an online-only section that requires a huge amount of time to design and manage. I don’t personally know any other educators (at least in the public sphere) who even teach online classes. When I mention it to my colleagues at four-year colleges they give me this dumb look that says “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to teach online.” The thing is that I’m proud of the fact the we offer classes (and even some degrees) online at Foothill. When you combine that kind of access with our extremely affordable tuition, you’re truly opening doors for a lot of underserved students to pursue a meaningful education. To make matters worse, we’re moving to a new online learning management system over the next year and I’m going to have to port about fifteen classes. Fun.
A third hat that we in the CTE (career and technical education) sector wear is to keep pace with our industry. I try to keep my finger on the pulse on what’s happening in the audio engineering, audio post-production, and game audio worlds. And in a CTE program I’m also tasked with steering our curriculum to keep it relevant in the industry. That means not just personally following trends (like in a traditional academic program), but modifying our courses and degrees to reflect those trends as quickly as possible. One reason I’ve been buried in work for the last two years is that I’ve written six new classes during that time. And to make matters worse, because I’m so dedicated (or crazy), I’ve had academic terms where I’ve taught TWO of those new classes for the first time.
Geez, writing all this down is really not helping my stress level. But you can start to see why my wife thinks I make this job much harder than it needs to be. And she’s probably correct. But I love my job and I wouldn’t want to do it any other way. Now if I could just get a couple of teaching assistants…