No one ever mentions that the real work of being an academic is the prepping. Sure there's teaching, conducting studies, analyzing data, and writing. There's also meeting with students, responding to emails, and going to meetings. All of that is concrete stuff that can be scheduled and more or less has a finite amount of time required. But this prepping stuff...

For the past three days, I've been working on one syllabus. What's worse is that I'm using the exact syllabus that I used last year, the only changes are some dates and two projects. But getting the dates to work out and fit with due dates for the other classes, and determining the projects, their point values, how they will be graded, and writing up instructions is taking forever. After I finish this stuff for this one class, I have one more class to do and for that one I don't have an old syllabus to start from.

Additional prep work for that third class involves prepping all of the lectures. There's no way that I'll get them all finished for the semester in the next two weeks, but I need to at least get myself a head start. The spring is my four class semester, which means much less time to get everything done and an extra 20+ students to grade. While a 5 week break in the winter is nice, it is a time of prepping that is essential.

Slate had an article recently on why college students have such long breaks. There were a number of explanations given... energy savings, money savings, tradition... but I think they failed to look at it from the side of the professor. That time is needed for a brief recuperation followed by prep, prep, prep!