Trying to please everybody

I've already mentioned that one of my responsibilities at work was setting teaching assignments for our department for each school term.

This involves first of all deciding how many of each type of class (lecture or laboratory) each faculty member will be handling. This is a tough thing to do given the we are short of staff compared to the courses that we have to offer each school term. Most of the time, I have to make the painful choice as to who would have to handle more than the required normal teaching load.

The next thing I do is decide which courses will be handled by whom. In doing so, I naturally have to consider each faculty member's teaching preferences and, to a certain extent, qualifications to handle a course. As always, there are the very popular courses, which are those that most would prefer to teach, and then there are unpopular ones which are the courses nearly nobody wants to teach. (I happen to be handling a pair of courses that nobody else wants to teach and this is the main reason why I've been stuck with these two courses for nearly ten years now.) Most of the time, I get to assign to each faculty member the courses they would like to handle. But since somebody has to teach the unpopular courses and there are not enough sections for the popular courses for all those who want to teach them, I have to make another set of painful decisions regarding who would be forced to teach the unpopular courses and who cannot teach the popular ones.

Then the last thing I do when making these teaching assignments is assign specific lecture and laboratory sections to each faculty member so that the class schedules are not in conflict each other. While this is complicated as well and takes a few hours to do manually, this is not as big a hurdle as the one regarding teaching preferences.

Once all is done--and it sometimes takes me one or two days depending on how I get interrupted at work in the office--I finally release the teaching assignments to the rest of the teaching staff in the department.

And that is exactly what I did yesterday. I mailed everybody a copy of the teaching assignment and waited in my office for the first bomb to drop. And sure enough they started coming.

From those who were forced to teach the unpopular courses I got the expected howls of protest. But what can I do? I simply tell them to find somebody to swap courses/sections with if they really don't like what's given to them. There are those who also let me know that they don't like their schedules because they would like to have so-and-so day of the week free. So I tell them the same thing I tell the latter group: find somebody to swap sections with. Others are more resigned and accept what is given to them. But generally to those who are unhappy with their teaching assignments I just have to step back and wash my hands of the matter because I've done what I can do.

Besides, I've tried handing over the responsibility to others but they've all refused. They all understand that it is after all a very tough job trying to please everybody.