Confessions of a swamped college instructor

Students in my Advanced Social Psychology course have a big research proposal paper due on Wednesday. They've completed several assignments up to the final paper, including a rough draft that I provided feedback on (which is totally time consuming and I'd like students to know that when an instructor asks for a rough draft you shouldn't complain--they are doing you a FAVOR).

I taught this course once before and radically restructured it this time to place more of a focus on their papers because I think it's the most important part of the course. They are asked to come up with a research question, design an experiment to test their question, and give detailed predictions about what they expect to find. They are all required to have individual meetings with me at least once during the process, and additional meetings if necessary. This paper requires that they become familiar with a particular topic (of interest to THEM), think very hard about methodology and control, and really think through their hypotheses so that the resulting paper is coherent and (I hope) theory-driven.

Wednesday was listed as TBA on the syllabus, and my original plan was to watch videos or discuss topics that had been left hanging from other days. I like to build in a few days of "padding" just in case I am sick, classes or canceled, or they are hopelessly confused about something.

I told them today that since their final paper was due on Wednesday that I was canceling class just in case they needed that extra time to do a few more edits, and that they could turn the paper in to my mailbox by 4 PM. I framed the class cancellation as a reward for their hard work, and they have worked hard.

But the other, more earnest reason I decided to cancel class is that I am totally swamped and didn't want to scramble to prep something, especially if it was just something to fill time. In some sense, it was a reward for all of us. I've been very pleased with our class discussions and the amount of material we've covered this semester. If I really felt that there was something they weren't understanding or that they had been slacking off, I wouldn't cancel class, regardless of the prep time required.

I have to say, I am totally looking forward to that extra 75 minutes on Wednesday.