Busy Busy

As Fall 2025 semester approaches its end, I'm curious as to how much time I've spent teaching and writing over these past many years. So I ran some numbers, all rough estimates, but enlightening nonetheless.

At the San Francisco Conservatory of Music I estimate that over 97 semesters I have spent about 19,000 hours teaching in classrooms.

Between the Fromm Institute at USF and the University of California, Berkeley I have spent about 2950 hours teaching in classrooms.

So my classroom total is almost 22,000 hours.

I have given approximately 250 hours of pre-concert talks, primarily at the San Francisco Symphony and the California symphony.

And writing: again, using a rough estimate, it's about 740,000 words – close enough to three-quarters of a million. I'm basing that on an average of 500 words per composition * 1478 composition.

Some of those numbers require adjusting. For example, at the Fromm Institute I have a grand total of about 242 total -- really not that much. But consider that every 1.5 hour class I teach at Fromm requires about 8 hours prep time -- so we're really looking at (242/1.5)*8 = 1,290 hours devoted to Fromm teaching.

Following that train of thought, at SFCM I need prep and grading time for my various classes. I figure for every three hours of class time I need about another hour of prep/grading. So if I add that to my totals, I come up with: 26,190 hours for SFCM instead of my original 19,000 estimate.

Pre-concert lectures also require a certain amount of prep time: for every hour doing a pre-concert talk, it's about 3 hours prep on average. So really the amount is more like 968 hours devoted to pre-concert talks.

That sounds like a lot. But it's over 49 years, and again the numbers tell me clearly that it's not anywhere near filling all the time – about 7% for the classroom time plus prep.

For pre-concert talks, it's averaged over 24 years, thus less than 1% per year.

For the writing: it comes out to an average of only 32,000 some-odd words of writing per year. (I've been at it for about 23 years now, and I write a lot more nowadays than I used to; the average is misleading, to say the least. In 2025-2026 I'm contracted for about 150,000 words, for example.)

So: yes, I'm busy busy. But I could do more.