Less than two weeks before classes are scheduled to begin, Department Head finally emailed me my teaching assignment. The first line read There’s been a slight change in plans. I’m afraid the hours are not very good, and ideally we’d have you teaching different classes, and Bear in mind that Department Head is British, and characteristically, prone to understatement, and you can imagine why I was hesitant to scroll down.”The damage: Sixteen hours a week teaching four classes, three preps. Thirteen of those hours are spread over all of two days, and the other three are spread over another two days. If I weren’t teaching the class, I wouldn’t show up for that single hour I have calculus on Mondays. None of my classes start before 11:30″ On the heavy teaching days, four and a half hours of my teaching are uninterrupted. Four classes, three preps – two sections of statistics, one of precalc (the same one I taught last term), and one of integral calculus. But it’s not so bad, really. I’m – hesitantly – excited about the stats assignment, as I think I may be able to incorporate some interesting topics from John Allen Paulos’ Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper – but I don’t know how flexible the curriculum is. The textbook is typical of stats-for-arts-students books: enough mathematics to legitimately file it with the other math books, but definitely on the squishy side of the spectrum. Precalc so far has an enrolment of twelve, touchwood, and none of those twelve are among my flunkies from last term, touchwood. Integral calculus, presumably, will not contain any students who don’t know that fractions are numbers.”All of this, alas, may be a nonissue, because lately my union – without a collective agreement since February, apparently – has been making noises about bargaining, which I know from experience will soon give way to noises about striking. I also know from experience – that’d be the $GRADSCHOOL TA Strike of