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[anon12]

My SO and I have been together 10 yrs

I recently got a tenure track job at a rural University.
But he has now been unemployed since July: he's in a tech field
and there are no jobs in our area.

He has been looking very diligently for a new job and so far the only leads
he has gotten are from jobs that are 2000 miles from our current location.
If fact he's flying off to interview for a couple next week.

At the current time I am rather unhappy in my job.
I guess the honeymoon of being a new faculty has worn off.

It seems like I work
all the time, have no time for anything but work on weekdays.
I have to schedule when I go to supermarket for example!

I bring work home and do grading etcetera til at least midnight every weekday
and then do more on the weekends.
Is this kind of workload normal?!?
The only thing that enables me to hold onto my sanity is
spending time with SO on weekends

What am I to do if SO gets job 2000 miles away?
I took a look for jobs in the area in which he is interviewing:
theres none there for me.
And the thought of giving up a tenure track position, even if it is currently
making me very unhappy is daunting.
The idea of going through the whole job search process again is also
rather unpleasant.

Does anyone have any advice? Any cheery thoughts?
How to find a job in the same vicinity as SO?
How to find an academic job with a lessened work load?
Is the kind of workload I have normal?
I have 150 students, 10 lectures a week, and grade about 250 things every week.

[writingprof]

and grade about 250 things every week.

Start by eliminating that insanity.  You work at a college, not a high school.  And my rather wide experience suggests that, even at teaching colleges, no one cares how well you teach.  Publish, publish, publish your way out.

[katttt]

That sounds like a heavy load, but perhaps not untypical for a teaching-focused school or a lecturer-line. How does it compare with what your colleagues are doing?

If there is someone in your department who you have a good rapport with, I'd suggest talking with her/him about the work load. Perhaps they would have some advice. If you are on good terms with the Chair, I'd definitely start there.

Do you have any flexibility in what/how-much you assign your students? When I had a very heavy load at a school previous to one I teach at now, I consciously cut back on how much grading I would have to do. It might not have been pedagogically ideal, but something had to give.

[macaroon]

250 assignments from 150 students per week?  Are you seriously grading more than one thing per week per student?

Set up some automatic grading on a course management system.  That will help enormously. 

Yes, all pre-tenure faculty do is work, work, work.  All day, all night.  That cannot possibly be news to you, is it?

If you are at a small rural school, talk to your chair and possibly a dean about finding employment for your SO.  Perhaps they can find something in Residence Life or alumni relations?  Rural schools have a hard time finding talented local people to take key staff positions, and are often very willing to try out a faculty spouse.

[offthemarket]

What matters to your success at the university is not how well you teach, but how well it is perceived that you teach.  You can still teach very well, but not grade a lot.  And it won't hurt your reputation by grading less, unless you brag about it.

You may recognize (correctly in my view) that frequently evaluated assignments help students learn.  But you can also have the students assess one another (peer review) frequently and reduce not have these assignments count towards the grade.

[hegemony]

You are doing way too much grading.  Way too much.  You need to put a stop to this.  Don't tell yourself "But I must uphold my superior standards of teaching" or "The department will hate me if I don't assign this many things."  Neither of those is true.  You need to cut down on the things you assign your students and cut down on the amount of time you spend grading each.  Seriously -- how long did you spend mulling over the deathless insights written in the margins of papers when you were an undergrad?  Spend a maximum of ten minutes per paper.  And assign far fewer papers.  Devise other kinds of assignments; set up peer feedback groups in class; streamline everything.  Keep meticulous notes so you can teach this course straight out of the box the next time around.  Just as learning to do original research and write is the job of a PhD student, the job of a new tt professor is to learn how to teach without letting it take over your life.  You should be stopping at 6 pm and not working on weekends.  In busy times, maybe a few hours on a Saturday.  Aim for that.  That's how the sane professors do it.  Then you'll be in a good position to weigh up your alternatives.

[lizzy]

I teach twelve classes a week, and have about the same number of students, but I do not grade 250 things per week. As others have persuasively observed, you need to reassess your assignment structure. When do you work on your scholarship? Do service for your department and university? You say that you're TT. If you want to be tenured, you'll need to make sure that you're fulfilling all expectations, not just those for teaching. Do you have someone in the department you can talk to frankly? If not, are there ways of comparing assignments with others teaching comparable courses?

Beyond that, wait and see what happens with your spouse. If he gets a job that offers more money than yours and it's in a more desirable location, then perhaps it might be worth giving up the TT job to be with SO. If not, then you'll need to find a way to make this job work. In any case, you must be able to establish a manageable workload.

Best of luck to you!