I like the idea of Monday-Wednesday-Friday courses. Three 50-minute class sessions each week can help prevent students from getting bored in class. These short sessions are also more easily filled with a class exercise or discussion, allowing me to cover fewer topics in more depth.
Until the beginning of this semester, I had never taught a Monday-Wednesday-Friday course. In graduate school my courses were either once or twice a week. I never really considered the ramifications of this until the semester got underway and I realized that there are not enough week days to prepare for two new MWF preps.
So far this semester I’ve been preparing for each class session a day or two in advance. This means that I prepare for Wednesday on Monday or Tuesday and Friday on Wednesday or Thursday. This also means that the only in-office time I have to prepare for Monday’s class is Friday afternoon. Unfortunately, I can rarely prepare quickly enough to avoid my prep time overflowing into the weekend.
Someday when I only have to prep one class (or fewer!) a semester, this may not be too bad. As it is I’ve resolved the problem in the near term by arranging my spring preps for Tuesday-Thursday.
Memoirs of a SLACer 
[…] include taking up a lot of time at the beginning of each class (especially during the 50-minute MWF classes), student whining, and the fact that I am constantly reminded that not all students come to […]
[…] This total included an average of 41.88 hours in my office and 5.84 hours at home (damn those MWF classes!). On a typical day I arrived at my office around 7:30 and left around 4:30, with most of my work […]
[…] I had planned to spend most of my time preparing for class on Friday and Monday (the upside of three-day-a-week classes is that if you have enough of them your schedule appears clear on the other two days). […]
[…] as a new assistant professor. My first semester taught me that I didn’t like preparing for MWF classes and that I didn’t have any time for research. In my second year I started my advising and […]