Ok…enough bitching.

I am due mid-semester.

When I told the uppers, they said, “What are you going to do?” And I replied, “Have it.”

On the 60 hours – well ours is in the faculty handbook and it is used to evaluate annual reports, calculate merit evaluations, and so on.

A 3 hour course is theoretically worth 12 hours. If you are an instructor with no research, service, or administrative responsibilities, your course load is 5 3 hour courses per semester. 5 x 12 = 60.

If you are a professor with teaching responsibilities defined at 50%, then you teach 5 3 hour courses per year. The remaining 30 hours a week are for research, service, and administration (if any). There are some guidelines about how many publications one should be able to get out in that time, too.

And MS: Thanks for stopping by to comment. TAs can be very helpful, but only if you have them, and since the person in question has a 4-4 load, I’m doubtful that she’ll have all that many at her disposal. But, it’s another variable to consider.

Why can’t we just have a year off at 90% pay as Canadians do? And yet, their dollar is as strong as ours these days…

I liked the comment from H-Women about UK policies. Canada gives you a year of leave. Sigh.

Oh, profgrrrl just posted recently about how she worked out maternity leave for next spring, here

Can you make this into an “opportunity” for the graduate students in your department to take over a couple of your classes each, taking responsibility for teaching mini-units or whatever?

(These numbers, of course, presumably include what we sometimes like to call “my own work…,” which I suppose we really ought to be paying THEM for the privilege of doing under their auspices, right? )

And Tracy, thanks for stopping by to comment. I think you’re exactly right that no one at work will ever appreciate or even notice that you’re killing yourself to get back to work right after you deliver. I curse those senior women who were dismissive of your reasonable need for accomodation. (How nice that they feel it all worked out OK for them–but there are no guarantees. Some people end up on mandatory bed rest. Some of us have children who live in the NICU for a month or two. Some people have traumatic birth injuries that need to be repeatedly fixed because they’re not healing properly.) That’s just bullying in defense of their failure to change the system or become your advocates. And *please* don’t beat up on yourself. The system is clearly rigged to make it very difficult to request a maternity leave, let alone negotiate it all by yourself.

Indyanna, I hear what you’re saying about our unique, irreplaceable selves, but I’m sure that most of us would be relieved not to have the responsibility of overseeing our classes from a distance while recovering from heart attacks/surgeries/childbirth/etc. I’d feel perfectly happy about being replaced without any sweat or anxiety on my part! (Hey–what do we pay administrators to do anyway? Like you said, it happens all the time in every other line of work, and yet the earth still rotates on its axis…)

“…no one will ever appreciate the fact that you came back quickly and sacrificed your family life to alleviate the burden on the institution. No one. Ever.”

You might also check to see what sort of paid *disability* leave you have – this is sometimes different from and (maybe) in addition to sick leave.

You might also talk to the business office / HRM before you talk to the dean. They (if they are on their game) will be aware of solutions, at least in terms of how leave is calculated etc., that the dean is not.

For example, by state law, my university can give partial sick leave. That is: if I have accrued 6 weeks of paid sick leave, and I have an illness or health issue such that I can work part time, but for the convenience of everyone, need to have that schedule for the entire semester (i.e., part time all semester as opposed to 6 weeks gone and then back full time), the 6 weeks of leave can be broken up into hours and spread out over the semester.

I did this once because of an injury, and my own school didn’t know it could be done and couldn’t have told me.
I knew about it because the HRM office at another state school did. My school was then glad to find out, because it was more convenient for them and it was useful to know about.

Illustration: In my case what I needed was one course release so I could have time to make physical therapy appointments (in the second half of the semester) and have time to compensate for my slowness, given that my right arm (I am right handed) was in a rigid cast from fingers to shoulder for the first half of the semester.

One course was considered to be 12 hours a week, and 12×15 is 180, and 180 divided by 60 (our work week is defined as 60 hours) is 3, so I only had to take 15 days of leave to get released from one course.

It worked out nicely – the course I was released from was a multisection one a lot of people teach, so one of the instructors got paid overtime, out of the general fund, to give my section of it in addition to hers.