Invisible Hours

By Carolyn Foster Segal

In my first week at the college where I have now worked for 11 years, my department chairwoman told me the most important thing I could do was to "be seen."

Be visible not just in the classroom or in the halls of the humanities building, she said, but around the campus. Participate on committees, attend extracurricular events, and eat lunch regularly in the campus cafe.

Being visible has its downside, of course. It leaves you open to the slings and arrows of critics. Not everyone may like the decision that your committee reaches. A student will invariably appear before you in the cafe with a burning question about late work just after you have bitten into an unwieldy chicken salad sandwich. Faculty members outside your discipline may find your activities suspicious.

In fact, during that same first week on the job, I was challenged by a professor in another area. How was it, she wanted to know, that I had time to sit on the porch of the humanities building reading The New Yorker? (The answer was that it was a text for one of my classes.)

On countless occasions since then, I've sat or paced on that porch, with and without texts, and with and without student visitors. I may be mentally reviewing a plan for a syllabus, figuring out how to respond to an especially problematic student essay or e-mail message that I've left behind on my desk, or, in rare instances, even working out a tricky line in one of my own poems.

I call this visibly doing invisible work, and no one has questioned me about it in quite a while. My position as a teacher of writing (not to mention my record of developing courses and programs) has helped deter critics. I'm not just enjoying the afternoon; I may be seeking inspiration from the passing scene or thinking lofty thoughts.

The problem with visibly musing, however, is that it isn't nearly as productive as sustained periods of solitude. And sustained periods of uninterrupted concentration are what program development, solid teaching (and grading), and writing require.

The time I spend in class, as exhilarating and stimulating as it may be, represents only a small percentage of my work week. From the outside, it might seem as though mine is a life of luxury. After all, my four courses combined mean a total of just 12 hours in the classroom (I can still hear a departed dean on that topic).

If, however, I add on the time I spend grading papers and exams, advising students, developing new courses, attending meetings, and prepping for class, the grand total is far higher. After my first tumultuous semester as an assistant professor, I began keeping track of my hours, both visible and invisible. Not counting the comparably few hours I spend on my own writing, I log, on average, 60 hours a week of work.

Much of my real work takes place outside the classroom and the campus, and is performed during what my first department head referred to as "invisible" time. If a faculty member falls in a forest, or grades papers alone until midnight, and no one sees or hears her, does that accountable time still exist? Does she?

The current mania for assessment and its accompanying blitz of paperwork, combined with the push for faculty accountability (and availability) to students (and their parents), and the growth in interest in professional programs over the liberal arts -- not to mention the race for the accelerated degree -- has put additional pressure on faculty members, like those in my humanities department, who were already working long invisible hours.

What, exactly, are we doing when no one's watching? We're reading new editions and preparing to use them in our courses. The booming used-book business has forced publishers to compensate by issuing new editions at a rapid rate -- in some instances, yearly. With a new edition or an old one, it takes 10 or more hours to prepare for a seminar.

We're also reading and evaluating student work. It can take an hour or more to grade a single paper; a semester's worth of my students' papers is the equivalent of War and Peace (a rather bad translation of War and Peace).

That is why the overreliance on adjunct instructors in English is so insidious and reprehensible. Often hired to teach the most work-intensive courses, the adjunct worker is virtually invisible -- all of the time -- and grossly undercompensated.

Moreover, two developments over the last few decades have turned composition teachers into the equivalent of Disney's sorcerer's apprentice (alas, not Trump's apprentice).

The first change was in the shift from product to process in teaching writing. We now require students, when writing a paper, to turn in a series of versions, from the initial draft to the final copy. Some professors allow multiple revisions. My advice is to stop that practice immediately, for that way madness lies for the instructor, and it only makes students more dependent on us (the very opposite of the leadership lessons that so many colleges promise).

The second change in teaching composition is the now widespread use of the computer -- a marvelous tool with several unfortunate side effects, most notably, the added ease with which plagiarists can hone their craft. So on top of the hours we devote to grading (and reading campus e-mail messages -- another endless chore), add several more hours devoted to searching the Internet on a regular basis for purloined work. The widespread use of the computer also means that those early drafts and final revisions mentioned above may arrive any hour of the day or night.

At a small college like mine, faculty members are indeed visible, teaching classes not only on weekdays but on weeknights and Saturdays; summers and winter breaks feature accelerated evening and weekend classes. It isn't unusual for a faculty member to serve on multiple committees, and major committees meet every week, sometimes twice a week. Advising and conferences -- nearly as important as classes and nearly as time consuming -- are also part of the weekly routine.

When, then, does the invisible time we need to do our jobs actually come into play?

The answer is during all available "free" slots -- any weekdays hours without a scheduled class (I gave up those daily lunches in the campus bistro long ago), late afternoons, late nights, early mornings, Sundays, summer days not already devoted to in-class time, and most major holidays.

I've graded papers while the Thanksgiving turkey was in the oven, prepped Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth at 2 a.m. in a conference hotel, and read Samuel Beckett's Endgame at Little League practice.

And most of those days, it seemed worth it. This is, after all, the life I wished for (although I've come to wish for just a little bit less of it). At any rate (billable or not), the new semester is starting, and I'm ready for my close-up -- I've spent the summer break preparing, working quietly, steadily, invisibly.