I have to say, I am loving this four-day-a-week summer teaching schedule. I'm also loving that classes meet every day - it seems that you can move a lot faster, there's less need to review. People seem to forget less from day to day.

I wish they could "make it so" for the regular semesters - have us teach only two (or maybe, three at the outside) classes at once, and have those offered every day for eight weeks. I think the intensive "block" is good for the students (even though some of them complain of being tired, and yes, it is a little tiring teaching so intensively each day).

And I love having Fridays free. If I ran the circus, I'd make it that every working person had a four-day week, and got at least one weekday off. (I'd stagger them so not everyone was off the same day.) It's lovely to have that day free to, in my case, work on research. Or to get caught up on work stuff without interruption. Or even to just run errands at a time when not everyone else and their children are running errands too. (I do not like shopping on Saturday afternoon and will avoid it if at all possible. It seems that that time - particularly on a hot day - brings out the worst in people). Even though I only teach one or two classes on Fridays during the regular term, and am done by noon, it's still more special to have a day that it totally unscheduled.

If I had to give some advice to our administration on how to encourage faculty to do research, this is what I'd say:

1. Arrange the schedules of people with an active research program so that they have either Friday or Monday totally off, to work on their research. (Don't REQUIRE them to be in every week working on it, but make it clear that some kind of progress is expected). People who complain that that's unfair, well, they can take up research programs too.

2. Exempt people with active research from having course overloads. It's really hard to teach 14 hours and do research too.

3. Cut down on the bs meetings. (This applies to everyone). We don't have a LOT of meetings on campus, but there are at least three or four a year I could list that basically involve us sitting in a room being talked at for a couple of hours. Usually being told stuff we already know. It's a waste, and people know it - note how many of the full-approaching-retirement prof's chairs are empty at these meetings.

4. Adjust committeework requirements. Let people choose - either they can have a heavy committeework burden, or they can have a research program. Don't go down the inevitable path of overloading the already hardworking people until they collapse under the strain.

5. Make graduate student stipends better so we get more good graduate students. This summer semester is the first time I've had real graduate TAs for my labs, and it's a joy. One lab I never even have to deal with. The other one I just show up to and banter with the students and answer a few questions. I don't even have to grade the labs! It's wonderful. Hire more responsible graduate students. (And put safeguards in place so some of the irresponsible people that we had TAing in the past get fired and not rehired. It's NOT fun having someone not show up for a class they're supposed to help teach just because they 'don't feel like it' that day.)

(I don't mean to malign the undergraduate TAs, we've had some fine ones. But I think the dynamic is very different when the person nominally in charge of your class is someone that is a fellow student in other classes you take - not to mention that that can lead to some odd issues in the grading [privacy violations]. I usually do my own grading when it's an undergrad TA but this summer the grad student offered to do it and I took her up on it.)