Saturday, February 5, 2011

Another week gone by

Sorry about the lack of posts. Proposal deadlines this month have been eating up my fun time along with teaching.

On the teaching front, our department has been struggling with the amount of emphasis it wants to place on teaching versus research for the faculty. As a private school, there is much talk about how we are here only because of the undergrads. I was hired to be research active faculty. I care about teaching, but I have no plans of redesigning courses or having office hours during the nights and weekends to keep students happy. I'm a bit worried because we have some well liked teaching faculty (we call them academic specialists or something like that) that do things like this and are loved by the students. The faculty that push teaching also quickly and often point to these people as examples of model educators. Granted they are teaching four courses per semester, but they have no research or service responsibilities. They are also not tenure track, yet I feel like my teaching is being held to the same standards. And of course, I can't seem to get any official feedback from anyone.

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