themselves lucky to have access to a desk and part of a filing cabinet, but
you should argue for what you need to help you to do your job well.
9 Set reasonable boundaries. Part-time teachers can often find themselves
called upon to work almost full-time for significantly less money than their
fully contracted peers. It is especially common for part-timers to be
pressurized into coming in for meetings outside their normal hours. You will
need to balance a natural desire to be helpful, flexible (and employable),
while at the same time not allowing people to take advantage of you. You
may also need to check what your contract may say about meetings.
10 Let people know what else you do. Many people work part-time because
they have other work or responsibilities. By informing people about your
other lives, you will help them not to make unreasonable demands in your
non-contracted time.50 Coping with your paperwork
Information overload (seemingly encouraged by the availability of computers), is
a fact of the life of staff in many educational institutions. Usually the information
flow seems one way—on to your desk! This paperwork may also appear to be not
directly related to your own course and learner responsibilities. The following
suggestions can help you to take care of this general paperwork.
1 Perform a crude sorting task on the paperwork. Most of the paperwork
can be safely filed. Some requires action on your part, either in creating your
own paperwork or as an item for action.
2 Prioritize your responses. Deal first with anything that directly affects the
wellbeing of learners and/or colleagues. Deal quickly with financial and
budget-related paperwork, too. Student records and assessment returns
usually need to be processed by many departments and can have funding
implications, so they also should be dealt with as soon as possible.
3 Use your secretarial/clerical support staff. Their job roles probably make
them better than you at efficiently processing standard paperwork. They will
be aware of any protocols about official stationery, house styles, etc. There
may also, because of quality monitoring and a growing interest in litigation,
be a requirement that all external and student (or student’s sponsor)
communications be centrally generated and a file copy held.
4 Keep files, not piles! Handle each piece of paper as few times as possible. Try
to avoid the situation of repeatedly sifting through piles of papers, looking
for the particular documents you need. Equally, piles seem to ‘lose’ the
document you want. If you think how long you have spent on occasions
looking for a particular piece of paper, you will know in your heart that
spending just some of that time organizing a good filing system would have
been well worthwhile.500 TIPS FOR TESOL 93