Well the start of term is here again and I am TA ing on 3 courses for the same department this year - great! But has anyone else had their unit being really fuzzy on the details - for example for one of my courses I am teaching either one or two hours subject to uptake (that's fine) the problem is the first tutorial is on Thursday and I don't know how many classes I'm supposed to teach! For another course I found out today as a result of some crossed wires in a conversation with a lecturer who does teach on the course that I am supposed to be teaching another course on Thursday - I had no idea! I have no idea what text I'm supposed to teach, what the course requirements are or of anything really! Is it just my uni that manages to be quite so unclear or is it the same everywhere?

Um looks like it's the same everywhere. Put it this way, term starts next week at my uni and they only just employed me yesterday. I will be teaching some subjects I have no idea about and I can't start for at least a month either!

Yep. It's disgusting, really. I still have no idea what modules I will be teaching on - no idea re timetabling or content. I actually can't believe people expect us to do a good job with such little organisation and often very little prep time. Woe betide anyone who ends up with a Monday morning slot, too, because often the module leaders will not send out the material to cover until super last minute. (Last year I had 9am Monday every week for 12 weeks, and never ever got the stuff before 5pm on the preceding Friday; once in fact, the email dropped at 9.57am on the Monday. If I hadn't done a version of the same module the previous year, I would have had no content to teach in the class.)

I can understand - to a certain extent - why the start of the Autumn semester is so disorganised but there really is no excuse for materials not to be available to the teaching teams - because if we are all honest the course content varies so little from year to year that it is 90% the same. I just feel like academic institutions haven't caught up with the reality for most PhD students - in my field - full stipends are a thing of the past and teaching is so unpredictable and piecemeal that everyone I know has other jobs too, we can't rearrange our lives with two days notice in order to teach and so people are missing out on that experience.