I am not interested in this, but I need to be. I would be more interested if we did not have a cumbersome textbook and website package to navigate, and if we had a/v that really worked. I am getting more interested because I am getting a part-time TA to whom I need to be responsible, and I could get more interested if I had students who were. I could also get interested if the people giving the courses were a team and the team had an interesting and useful leader. In the absence of this kind of stimulus, what do you do to get yourself interested in things you find onerous? I am very good at hiding my lack of interest, but how do I increase my actual interest level?
My loss of tolerance of this kind of teaching (I always did tolerate it, even if not truly interested) has a direct correlation to the moment in which we started having an e-workbook to grade, and other technology that our machinery could not support. Reduction of drudgery is very important generally, and according to my contract I am to spend 24 hours per week on this project every fall so reduction of drudgery is actually essential in this case. At the same time, I must also limit enthusiasm since I do lack the time and interest it takes to do every cute thing one can for these classes, and also because enthusiasm sets one up for more disappointment with the students’ attitude than I can easily manage.
What do you do? My typical answer to this kind of situation is to do it with love, but that is too much; the question here is to find the good-enough, non perfectionistic yet satisfactory interest point. For this subject, I know how to do this for other schools or for the past, but not here. I think we are overwhelmed with materials. I think the instructors are, too, and are not using the materials at all but developing their own; this is fine if you have time but bad for program coherence. I want to know where to cut and where to expand, and my feeling is that this needs to be a collective decision we can stick to. I keep trying to find a solution I can wield as an individual but without devoting 80% of my time to it, as one research colleague appears to do.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Long time lurker here, I commented perhaps once or twice before, but I’ve been reading.
A question: how much time do you spend on these courses? Since all of this is so unsatisfactory and you don’t enjoy any part of it, yet you need to do it every fall, would it help to set a strict time limit on this and simply not use more time than that? I.e. you say that you are contracted to do 24hrs on this, why not then just decide to do exactly 24hrs and not a minute more and spent the rest of the time on what energises you (research)? You could imagine this as someone who is working at a 9-5 job: those people leave at 5 and don’t show up until 9 next morning, don’t work weekends and don’t spent a minute of extra time on work as required. So you could adapt that kind of attidude towards language teaching: fit it into the 24hrs and what is done in this time is done and not a bit more. This would probably require to change your approach so that you have to shorten your prep, give less feedback to students etc – but if they don’t care (as you say), why should you care more than them? You’ve been trying caring more than them for a long time and it hasn’t worked. So spend the minimum time required and use the rest for things you enjoy and research.
Sorry for being long-winded, but I hope this different perspective perhaps helps a bit…
I think this is true, but what I need to do is spend more of those 24 hours on the actual work and less of it on angsting about it. I don’t really have all the 24 hours, since they are based on the idea that I will work 60 total hours and I do not always have the 60. But a lot of the time spent on these courses is time spent interfacing with the other faculty and recovering from the overt hostility to the courses of about a third of the students, who were belligerent. And there are police style cases in these classes, I just had to deal with an indecent exposure case which meant, of course, I couldn’t do the small group work which is sacred in our department and built into the textbook. But you are right, work to rule, and we are getting official course descriptions and outcomes descriptions finally, and this will help.