I am proud to be a teacher.  I am proud to be a chemistry teacher.  I am proud to be a chemistry teacher at the College of DuPage. 

Both teaching chemistry and learning chemistry are hard work, and both have their respective highpoints and low points.  Although I was a good student in an excellent Chicago-area Catholic high school, I was not expecting the long nights of reading and homework during my first semester of engineering school.  I remember struggling to wrap my mind around acid-base buffers and balancing redox reactions.  I also remember the joy I felt when concepts “clicked.”  Through a combination of innate inclination, hard work, parental support, and a great study group, I became the first college graduate in my family some 30 years ago.

Today, I teach chemistry at a community college.  I have students who come from many and diverse backgrounds.  Many, like me, are striving to be the first college graduates in their families.  Some come from academic families with great expectations for their children.  Some, like me, had excellent high school educations.  Some never even finished high school.  All are my students, and all deserve a piece of my time and my soul.

During a typical semester, I teach four sections of general chemistry lecture and lab.  If the classes are full, which they often are at the beginning of a term, that is a total of 96 students.  I have two double lab sections; I lecture a total of four hours per week in 2-hour blocks for each double-section.  Since I have been teaching general chemistry for about 20 years, I don’t have to prepare each lecture from scratch, but I do review my notes and update slides as appropriate.  I know that students need to do homework to learn chemistry.  I also know that unless there is some impending deadline, they will not do that work with a sense of urgency.  I also want the students to be clear about what they do and do not understand.  I therefore give daily quizzes – that’s up to four quizzes to prepare and 192 quizzes to correct and grade each week.  Several times a term I prepare exams, which include show-your-work type questions and the possibility of partial credit. 

The laboratory portion of the course can be the most interesting, and the most work.  I supervise four sections of up to 24 students each week.  Of course, my primary concern is laboratory safety.  However, a close second is providing a meaningful learning experience.  My colleague and I have been working on a custom published laboratory manual for about a year, and we have at least another semester of serious editing to go.  I require students to keep a laboratory notebook, which includes a pre-lab assignment, qualitative and quantitative data, and calculations and conclusions.  Students must also type up a post-lab report explaining what they have done.  Although grading those 96 lab reports each week is the one tedious part of my job, I believe that the process of analyzing one’s finding,s and writing about it in one’s own words, is a valuable learning tool.

There are many things I do outside the class to assist my students’ learning.  I have 10 office hours per week.  Some weeks I have many students sitting down and working through problems or asking specific questions about difficult concepts.  I invite students who are struggling to visit me during office hours to discuss the situation; I also refer those students to our professional counseling faculty.  As a pre-pharmacy advisor, I help other students map out their college course-work.  I also field questions from students in other classes if their instructors are not available.  As the faculty advisor for the Future Pharmacists Organization, last week I brought in a soon-to-be pharmacist to talk to the club about her experiences and future plans.  There are many other non-teaching duties for full time faculty at the college; suffice it to say that there are a lot of reports to be written.

The College of DuPage Faculty Association (CODFA) has been in negotiations for the past year over our expired contract.  I tried to explain my teaching load to fellow chemists at recent professional society dinner meeting, and I learned that the details didn’t make a lot of sense to them.  This is not surprising, since I only understand those parts of the contract that specifically apply to me.  Without too much explanation, the situation I have described is a 16-hour load plus 4 to 6 hours overload (depending upon whether the sections are full).  This is a lot of work, and I personally would prefer to do less, but that does not work with COD’s daytime double sections of general chemistry.  I do get compensated for the overload hours at the adjunct rate.  Under the proposals being presented by the administration, my laboratory hours will be credited at 75% - resulting in a cut of 3 hours of overload per semester.  This is a significant cut to my pay, not the 3% or so increases I have seen reported on the COD web page.  Others at the college will be credited with 50% credit for their time in studio or activity classes.  They will need to be in class 30 hours per week, in office hours 10 hours per week, plus do all the other things we do. 

The justification for this change has been along the lines that laboratory instructors do not do as much preparation or grading as those who “lecture.”  I will tell you that my students and I do much more work for the lab section of the course than the lecture, both inside and outside of the contact hours.  To be fair, I must say that during my tenure at COD, my associate deans and deans have always shown appreciation and support for my work.  Sadly, it appears to me that the upper-level administration at the College of DuPage neither understands nor appreciates the work I do in lecture, lab, office hours, or with the students outside those venues.

Mary Newberg
Associate Professor of Chemistry
Chemistry Area Coordinator
Pre-Pharmacy Advisor
Future Pharmacist Organization Faculty Advisor