Help, I'm trapped in an ivory tower! Or "what the fuck am i getting myself into with this academia stuff"

I can imagine it. it wouldn't be the first choice! & you might just cancel the class, usually senior level logic is pretty low enrollment as are all senior level classes. but if you need it taught, can't cancel it, then you'll get someone in your department to do it. might eat a month in prep.

but I can see that not every discipline is like this, was just talking about philo (though it's true in math too)

Is it really true in math? I think in practice most math faculty I know would really struggle to teach all 3rd/4th year undergraduate courses (and that's assuming that we're only talking about either pure or applied - I doubt I know anyone who could comfortably teach all 1st/2nd year pure + applied courses, tbh), and even some of the 1st + 2nd year courses would be quite a stretch for most.

'who teaches A also teaches B' is a lot different from 'everybody can each everything' (and both are different from 'who would teach A if we were asking can also probably teach B okay so hell why not hire the bastard')

yeah i have an undergraduate math degree and even at that age to us it was clear that the algebraists and the analysts, the pure and the applied had their own fiefs and were likely not comfortable teaching outside them, comps aside—proving lagrange's theorem 20 years ago and reteaching it/having it come up in regular work in your field are very different things.

(my graduate program actually did not have comps, and likewise had faculty who in no way could have jumped on from their phil sci courses to teach undergraduate ancient, etc etc for ethicists who i do not recall having taught any first-year logic in the several years i was there.)

well I did say should be able to do teach any undergrad course, with "ought to be able ≠ is willing" tacitly thought disapprovingly held. I've done course scheduling enough to see how these things play out in practice. & I trust philosophers more the more widely they teach (don't mean publish though).

& yeah people have their fiefs but that's at least largely the result of laziness: if I prep my regular rotation of courses then I can snooze on teaching. which is deplorable imo

i had a english professor who would change her syllabi every year to incorporate books she hadn't read. i think you can get away with this in english, especially in seminars. however i am pretty sure she was behind in the reading a few times!kk

i try to incorporate one new course into every year i teach, by which i mean, i try to get a job, and it requires me to teach something i've never done, so i prep that

this sounds like a joke but it is also true, in the 4 terms of employment i have had since my phd (none was even a full load, though one was close) i have had to design and prep 3, 1, 1, and 1 new course(s). i wish i could have a rotation, some regularity.

i try to incorporate one new course into every year i teach, by which i mean, i try to get a job, and it requires me to teach something i've never done, so i prep that

This is basically my life too. (Private teaching requires this as well.)

I don't think I've ever had a term without at least one new prep. I even rewrite my notes for classes I've already prepped for the most part. I get so bored with teaching rotations that it drives down my research even. this is probably related to why I am constantly looking for new ~~~career opportunities~~~ (sooooo easily bored)

I'm not sure it's laziness - I mean a pure math department can easily have 50+ undergraduate courses, even if you teach new courses every year you'll find yourself teaching something you haven't used/taught/thought about in 20+ years. So even if you aced it as an undergraduate (by no means a given, I would assume) then it's pretty unlikely you'll do a good job of teaching it.

But actually the more I think about it the more I doubt the existence of many faculty who even took these courses as an undergraduate - I just glanced back at the undergraduate syllabus from my own days, and I'm sure no-one in my year took/read up on every 3rd year pure course (first couple of years are more reasonable, though).

but most of those undergrad courses are just lower division right? every math PhD should be able to teach upper division undergrad courses in all the core areas: I mean topology, real analysis, complex analysis, algebra (groups, rings, fields). I guess probably an analyst isn't going to teach combinatorics or number theory often at big places but in smaller depts I wouldn't see why not. my beau-père is a mathematician at a decently sized lib art college & has taught everything on the books over his 30+ year career there.

I mean I take it we're not just talking about research unis here

"Cmon if you have a PhD in the area you should be able to teach any undergrad class in the area"
...
haha it is not true in philosophy (or literature i'd wager!)

My experience with tons of rhet comp people who are often housed in english departments and outnumbered greatly by lit folks is that the literature profs are aghast at suggestions that they teach anything outside of their incredibly small area of specialty but can't understand why the rhetoric profs can't just teach classical rhetoric and tech comm equally well.

euler otm re:math depts, ime. if u think about a math dept, the UG classes are m/l the same everywhere. year of analysis & algebra required, ode, pde, prob, stats, and then electives like combo, number theory, topo, numerical. that doesn't mean each department is going to hire analysts in the same proportion to their undergrad classes; the incentives of hiring committees are totally independent of teaching needs. like when i was in undergrad, my topo prof (a geometric group theorist) won a fancy prize so they hired a bunch of group theorists to keep him happy. but they didn't increase the number of group theory courses offered

when i taught at a slac w/ a very small dept my major students were like 'we like the teachers in the dept ok but it's like the same course over and over again'

yeah the connection between permanent hires and teaching needs at a research uni will matter inasmuch as that'll affect how the dept sells the post to the admin, but once the hire is done then the dept will determine its own course offerings. new hires will bump up the grad offerings maybe but the undergrad courses will be chosen by what the faculty want to teach, how majors there are, and what other departments need (for math that's key, even at the upper division undergrad level)

the "same course over and over again" thing is bad for students, and for the aspiring vap a good way to spin what you can bring to soup things up, esp if you can get that across w/o saying "I'll mix up your tired course offerings fools"

other thing I was thinking j is that if you can have your advisor or other senior folks who know you contact a dept where you're worried about fit, that can help. they can reinforce what you explain in your cover letter: this person's AOS and AOC are blah but s/he can teach X Y Z too, here's why (tell a story based on what they know about you). that kind of reassurance can make a big difference b/c o/w searches even for vaps involve a lot of guess work ("well she took a class on Hegel but can she teach existentialism I dunno and what about aesthetics and what about applied ethics ......."

basically don't knock the hustle

oh i feel pretty well connected to this place, all things considered, don't know them but they have alums working there and are big on my committee members who are big on me. it's just, really, i'm no ethicist, and they're a dime a dozen.

yeah I wouldn't think about whether you're an ethicist, rather make it clear that you are ready and excited to teach the courses they need, give the right syllabi, and have people testify on your behalf. AOS etc is just fluff ime

apparently you have never been hired 'as a logician' at a community college, aos shit is bonkers now as a culling tool

i mean god damn, i am fully on board with the comprehensive vision - i am better suited to be a generalist than most of the people who have ever hired me, probably than many who have declined to hire me. but ppl need their boxes ticked.

shit really? I have a student who's trying to find a cc job, for geo reasons, hasn't been winning, maybe this is why

cc jobs are pretty great too

I mean I don't know what cc search coms are like, a big problem is if they're by people outside of the discipline, so that you'd be culled just for not listing the right AOS

in which case, just list the "right" AOS

haha i dunno i think this place was kind of screwy, but from what i know, ccs that don't hire thru the local temp pipeline (seems very common in my area to upgrade over time) are hella hard to break into, maybe your student needs to do the 'foot in the door' bullshit to prove emself trustworthy first. i would think your school would be fine enough for cc searchers, and yet not stigmatized w/ an elite glamor. but these places can have ~~opinions~~.

i applied at a local slac once that had not been using many temps, preferred visitors for budgetary/pedagogical reasons, and at the interview they mentioned having used one of my program's graduates several years back (~10? long memories) and had a 'bad experience'. they just supposed we were not turning out the 'right kind' of teachers for them.

ugh yeah, you're dealing with very small depts and prob w/ people w/o fingers on the "pulse" of grad programs so ~~opinions~~ can last a long time

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/04/lsu_academic_bankruptcy.html

says a lot about the job market and my performance in it that getting on an "alternate list" for a good postdoc sorta cheered me up. it means next to nothing in reality since people who have already accepted would have to leave in order me to be bumped up. that won't happen. still, a slight acknowledgement!

maybe someone will tap out and you'll get called in

best case is maybe that they get a better offer somewhere else. this is a good school and situation but it's only a one year fellowship.

Ha, I'm waiting for my connecting flight, scrambling to put my presentation together for tomorrow. I ended up with much less time for prep than I anticipated; feels like a crapshoot at this point.

Ugh, I've been up since 3:20, finishing this and rehearsing. I think it's less of a mess now, as long as I don't screw up from the lack of sleep.

Any acknowledgment is encouraging, esp from a good school. Good luck, Ryan.

im sure the adrenaline will carry you through. good luck!

Hilton is fucking sweet, though.
xpost thx

So they offered me the job on Tuesday and I just accepted. I'm still letting it sink in that I'll be moving yet again in a couple of months.

congrats!

congrats! nice to get a happy ending on this thread for once.

The successful candidate will teach a 4/4 load primarily in the areas of first-year writing courses and possibly second-year literature courses.

i swear that "possibly" appears in almost every miserable composition job listing.

the area of possibly second-year literature courses

Thanks, Sufjan and ryan! It's a visiting position (prob. renewable for four years) so not really an ending yet but, yeah, it's a great opportunity despite the mild upheaval. I hope it'll be happy though. There will be some real challenges at first.

http://chronicle.com/article/To-Protest-Colleagues-Lack-of/230057/

As a tenured associate professor of English at Yeshiva University, Gillian Steinberg had been a winner in academe’s fierce competition for secure, decent-paying jobs. For the past several years, as director of the writing program at Yeshiva's undergraduate men’s college, she had tried to lift up other writing instructors — offering them positions that, while not on the tenure track, at least were full time and on long-term contracts.

Last week, however, convinced that her efforts were about to be undone by administrators as part of a broader reorganization, Ms. Steinberg decided to walk away from her otherwise secure position. She formally resigned, effective at the end of the summer, when she plans to begin teaching at a private Jewish high school in Riverdale, N.Y.

well i finally got a break. i got a one year postdoc. i am being brought in as a replacement for someone who got a late TT offer and couldn't defer. ha. it's a pretty hi-falutin seminar though and hopefully i can do my damnedest one last time to salvage some kind of academic career.

congrats!

thanks! seminar is a topic that is sort of adjacent to stuff i consider myself to "do." so the rest of summer will be a pretty intense cram session.

Congrats! Does that mean it's a teaching post-doc? (My summer is also going to be a music technology cram session.)

I had a Skype interview on Monday for a VAP teaching position and am already seriously questioning whether I would even want to move halfway across the continent for a 4/4 teaching load.

Ha, I actually got called back for another interview this week. It kind of felt good to say "I have accepted another offer." When it rains, it pours, I guess?

yeah it includes a small teaching load. i dont even know what the course(s) will be yet, other than undergraduate. this has been very sudden.

things are happening for me also! but this isn't on 77 so funk dat

but congrats ryan, keeping the game alive

stay of execution! they're gonna have to physically remove me from academia.

yay congrats ryan!

(btw not in academia rn & rn don’t plan to return, for my own reasons; don’t miss it rn but ivory tower will always have (gnawed off) piece of my heart)

Has anyone been following the La C0ur scandal? Interesting stuff.

http://crookedtimber.org/2015/06/08/professors-do-far-less-teaching-than-the-public-imagines/