Can someone find me an excuse...?

[reinhard]

I'll cut down to the chase. There is a 8:30am tutorial I am asked to do, but I know that near the end of the term, no one will show up and is gonna waste my time and make me wake up early for no reason. I asked if there is a another course/time, but the person who handles TA matters ask "what course conflicts with the 8:30am tutorial?"

 

There is of course none, and the best excuse I got so far is "meeting with supervisor".

[TakeruK]

First the legal stuff:

 

Is this tutorial part of your duty as a TA? I think you are at a Canadian school right? This means that you are probably on a TA contract for your specific course and if someone is asking you to do a tutorial for a different course (i.e. one where you are not contracted for), then you have the right to refuse the additional work. Check with your collective bargaining agreement (CBA) if you are not sure. At my previous Canadian school, if the department wants to you to TA a different class, even if it's just a single tutorial, they usually have to draw up a new contract for something like 3 hours (prep time included) and they require your agreement.

 

However, if this tutorial is part of your contract for the course you are the TA for, then you cannot refuse this work. It is your responsibility as a TA and a professional to do the work that you are assigned to and committed to doing. As graduate students, we are paid to complete this TA work, and the money is generally public funds or donations. Actions like skipping tutorials or shirking other responsibilities just because you don't feel like it reflect poorly on your colleagues and other academics as well.

 

Second, practical advice:

 

If you have a legal reason to not accept this TA duty (first paragraph above), then it's up to you to decide whether or not to exercise your right to refuse the extra work. There are pros and cons: accepting the work even if you don't want it means that the school is more likely to step over other TA rights in the future; however, rejecting the work might damage your future relationship with the TA manager (even though technically your right to refuse work protects you against actions).

 

However, if you don't have a good reason, I would suggest that you accept that it is going to be sucky for the one day and bring your own work to the 8:30am tutorial and do that if no one shows up. Or, be honest and say that you don't think people will show up next week because it's the end of the term. I would think that the second choice will do you more harm than good and you will likely have to work the 8:30am tutorial anyways.

 

----

 

Finally, I reread this and now I am not 100% sure if you meant that you are asked to do a single 8:30am tutorial coming up really soon, or you are being assigned to a 8:30am tutorial for the upcoming semester as part of the department's TA scheduling. Everything above assumes that this is a one time thing in addition to whatever you have been TAing this term.

 

However, if you are talking about TA assignments for the next semester, then there is nothing you can do. Employees (TAs) do not get to choose their own work hours -- this is the prerogative of the employer (i.e. the Department). If they want to assign you to a 8:30am tutorial then it is well within their rights to do so because I don't think any CBA in Canada prevents this (nor should they). Sometimes you can hope that the Department allows for some legitimate excuses (e.g. picking up/dropping off children at daycare, bus schedules not matching up etc.) but if it's not in the CBA then they don't have to honour these requests. 

 

Sorry that this is not what you want to hear, but in your case, given that you admit there is no real reason for you to not do the 8:30am class (other than you want to sleep in), I don't think you have a choice and it is your responsibility to take the assignment given to you as you are the employee! If you are seriously worried that students will suffer because the tutorial time is inconvenient for students, you might want to talk to the professor in charge of the course to reschedule, but given that classroom scheduling is often very tight at many schools, it's unlikely that there are other open spots (you can still try though).

 

Edit: one last option that I highly do not recommend, but I'll include it for completeness. If this is your TA offer for the upcoming semester and you have not yet signed the contract, then you are also within your rights to refuse the TA appointment. This will mean that you will give up the TA salary and depending on the agreement/policies, potentially give up future years of guaranteed TA employment and/or other funding sources contingent on receiving TA salary. It will also very likely damage your relationship with the department. It is highly not recommended but it is usually an option.

[fuzzylogician]

To add to the above, keep in mind that if you make something up to get out of this less than desirable tutorial and it falls to someone else, this someone may not like you very much (and may not keep this dislike private) if what you did comes out. I know I wouldn't appreciate it. So, unless there is someone who would like to be there early and you can offer to switch with them so you both get a more desirable time, I don't know that I would bring it up. Someone has to do this time, and why shouldn't it be you? At most, I would state my preference for a later time and maybe bring up that you don't think it's a good time for the students, and hope that either they reschedule or find someone who is more inclined to do early times. 

[St Andrews Lynx]

Part of bring an adult in a job is that occasionally you have to do stuff you would rather not, at times you consider inconvenient but are without your contracted hours.

Unless your career plan is to become a hobo under a bridge.

Starting work at 8.30am for one quiet tutorial near the end of term is not a violation of your basic human rights. 

If you don't have a genuine excuse then there is no way you'll get out of this without sounding whiney, lazy and unprofessional. 

Just bring your laptop, spend an hour doing work/playing games then go back to bed if you wish once it's done. 

[reinhard]

Alright, thank you y'all. It's actually really a course with few relationships with what I am studying, I guess I'll chalk it up to bad luck.

[TakeruK]

If it makes you feel any better, one of my TA assignments was an 8:30am-10:30am lab session on Monday and Tuesday morning! At least with the lab component, it made sure the students actually showed up, though. On the bright side, it really did help my productivity because if I had, e.g. a 2:30pm to 4:30pm lab session, then I would probably not get any work done between 2pm and 5pm!! (at 2pm, it would be like "no point starting something when I have to teach in 30 mins" and at 4:30pm it would be "no point starting when I am going home soon!") etc.

[lewin]

I had an 8:30am weekly tutorial. Each week there were slightly fewer students and those that arrived did so slightly later until on week 10 the median arrival was 8:45. But I started on time each week and just sucked it up.  Now as an adjunct I teach a class that's 2:30-5:30 on Friday afternoons and on any given day only 60% of the class is there because it's clearly the worst timeslot of the week. (I'm honestly blown away on test days when the room is full.)

 

yada yada yada, when you're junior you get crappy time slots. Just part of paying your dues. And a benefit of the bad time slots is that the students who show up are the motivated ones.

Edited December 10, 2014 by lewin

[lifealive]

If it makes you feel any better, my second quarter teaching was at 7:30 in the morning. 5 days a week.

 

When we had to list our preferences for teaching, I put down on the sheet that I preferred not to teach at 7:30 in the morning. The director put me at 7:30 in the morning. The reason? Because I had expressed a desire not to.

[TMP]

One of our graduate students purposely scheduled his office hours at 8 AM (or something like that) so no students would want to show up and he could get his research done.  Bam, he got an article published this way.

 

When life gives you lemons....

[fuzzylogician]

One of our graduate students purposely scheduled his office hours at 8 AM (or something like that) so no students would want to show up and he could get his research done.  Bam, he got an article published this way.

 

When life gives you lemons....

 

I had a professor who would do this, entirely on purpose. He would schedule all his classes at 8am, so only students who were really interested and dedicated would show up. Made for better classes, and less work for him because fewer students would enroll.

[TMP]

I had a professor who would do this, entirely on purpose. He would schedule all his classes at 8am, so only students who were really interested and dedicated would show up. Made for better classes, and less work for him because fewer students would enroll.

 

 

I've considered doing the same but... I'm no longer such a morning person  My peers have told me that they have taught both mornings and afternoons and didn't really see much of a huge difference in student quality or enrollment (students here schedule whatever fits in their schedules).  When you schedule office hours is a different story, apparently.

[TakeruK]

I've considered doing the same but... I'm no longer such a morning person  My peers have told me that they have taught both mornings and afternoons and didn't really see much of a huge difference in student quality or enrollment (students here schedule whatever fits in their schedules).  When you schedule office hours is a different story, apparently.

 

At my undergrad school (big school!), this is definitely true. As much as I would like to have scheduled my classes the way I wanted, due to conflicts and such, I pretty much never actually had a choice on what time to take what class. And when I worked with some of the professors (as an undergrad research assistant), they sometimes would complain to the research group that they got a crappy timeslot or classroom location. It sounds like at big schools, Classroom Services does all of the scheduling of times and locations based on class sizes and availability, with very little input from professors themselves! Because of this, many of my physics classes (small) get scheduled in the English department in classrooms designed for discussion groups and my English classes (large) gets put into the large lecture halls of the Physics (or other sciences) buildings! I didn't have science classes in the science buildings until my senior year, where classes became small enough (< 10 students) to fit into the really small classrooms in the upper floor of my Physics building.

[ANDS!]

If you notice no one showing up for these sessions, send an email out to students asking them to email you letting you know if they intend to show up for this "tutorial hour".  I'm all for the "let's be responsible" bit, but who has office hours that early?  A class?  Sure.  An office hour?  Please.  Negotiating something beneficial to all can't hurt.

[lifealive]

One of our graduate students purposely scheduled his office hours at 8 AM (or something like that) so no students would want to show up and he could get his research done.  Bam, he got an article published this way.

 

When life gives you lemons....

 

This isn't a terrible idea. However, know that if you schedule your office hours at a completely inconvenient time, students will regularly ask you to meet them at different times (usually with the excuse that they have a class during your office hours or an athletic practice). And unless you want to get evaluations that say you were completely unavailable to help outside of class (a KOD on evaluations), you will be meeting with them outside your normal office hours. And you will end up holding office hours at 8 AM and then meeting with students at 3 PM or something like that.

 

And the more inconvenient your office hours, the more after-class chats you'll have to endure. I think it's just better to schedule your office hours for right after class. You're already on campus anyway.

[TakeruK]

I usually decide my office hours by class poll. In my opinion, when we perform teaching part of our jobs, we should work as best we can to help our students learn, not just the ones we deem "worthy" of our time.

[rising_star]

lifealive, after class is only a good idea sometimes. It all depends on the time of your class. As a TA, I often led back-to-back discussion sections, so it wasn't possible for me to do office hours immediately after, except after the last class. Other times, I couldn't do it after class because that was lunch or when I had class or because I was in the last slot of the afternoon (after which students go to work, athletic practice, etc.). 

 

TakeruK, you're nicer than I am! I never set office hours by a poll! I do try to have them multiple days of the week, with at least one day in the morning and one day in the afternoon. I find that spreading it out gives students options, which helps.

[lifealive]

As a graduate student, your primary responsibility is TO YOU. You should hold your office hours when they are most convenient for you. This has nothing to do with which students are "worthy" of you. As an underpaid TA with limited funding and precious little time to get through school, you need to do what you need to do to get through your program. That doesn't mean shirking your duties or shafting your undergraduates, but it also means setting clear boundaries and making it clear that you don't offer your services on demand. There is a difference between being hostile to undergraduates and simply prioritizing your own work. You are not a bad teacher or a bad person if you prioritize your own work. No graduate student is called upon to be endlessly accommodating and giving while they are collecting a stipend and trying to get through school.

 

When I was a graduate student, I would personally have never polled my students to ask them when I should hold my office hours. My time was precious, and my office hours unfolded on my terms. I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to hold hours when they were completely inconvenient for students, but I also made it clear that students needed to work around my schedule, not vice versa. If someone could absolutely not make my hours because they had an immovable commitment then yes, I would do my best to meet them at another time. But I certainly didn't tell them that they were the ones who had the power to set my schedule.

Edited January 11, 2015 by lifealive

[TakeruK]

I agree that our primary responsibility is to ourselves. I should make a couple of things clear though:

 

1. When setting office hour options, I only pick times that are already convenient to me! For example, recently, I had a block of time between 1pm to 3pm and I couldn't care less whether my office hours were 1pm-2pm or 2pm-3pm. So those were two of the poll options. I made the comment above as a response to people who think it is a good idea to purposely set office hours at times inconvenient to their own students. I agree that we should not bend over backwards to accommodate our students though!! Sorry if that was not clear. 

 

2. I also definitely agree that we should never offer services on demand. I know that the undergraduates in my class often do their homework at 1am and that it would be great if I could respond to emails all the time. I make it very clear that I only offer help during office hours and they should expect a ~24 hour response time if they send something via email. I agree that we have limited time on all our duties so I make sure the limited time was used most effectively!

 

3. I don't think there is really a dichotomy between "work" and "teaching". To me, "teaching" is as much a part of my job description as research. This was more clear when I was in Canada, where I was on contract for X hours per semester to teach and Y hours per semester to do research. But both X and Y are hours of "work" where I was employed by the school/department/supervisor.

 

4. Finally, I would say that "polling for office hours" only works in some cases. In Canada, at "big state schools", my classes were still really small (20-30 students) and while I didn't poll for exact time slots, I just asked if they preferred Monday afternoon vs. Tuesday afternoon given that assignments are due Wednesday. Now, at "tiny private school" in US, my class this quarter has 5 students. It is also a graduate class so some of my students are my colleagues/friends/collaborators. So I am usually a little more flexible and in return, my students/colleagues understand what being a TA is like and also do not ask for unreasonable things. But I think my first three points stand even without this last thing being true. (However, it does make it easier/more fun to be a "nice TA" when your students understand the difficulty of being a graduate student, a researcher and a TA at the same time!)

[lifealive]

I agree that our primary responsibility is to ourselves. I should make a couple of things clear though:

 

1. When setting office hour options, I only pick times that are already convenient to me! For example, recently, I had a block of time between 1pm to 3pm and I couldn't care less whether my office hours were 1pm-2pm or 2pm-3pm. So those were two of the poll options. I made the comment above as a response to people who think it is a good idea to purposely set office hours at times inconvenient to their own students. I agree that we should not bend over backwards to accommodate our students though!! Sorry if that was not clear. 

 

2. I also definitely agree that we should never offer services on demand. I know that the undergraduates in my class often do their homework at 1am and that it would be great if I could respond to emails all the time. I make it very clear that I only offer help during office hours and they should expect a ~24 hour response time if they send something via email. I agree that we have limited time on all our duties so I make sure the limited time was used most effectively!

 

3. I don't think there is really a dichotomy between "work" and "teaching". To me, "teaching" is as much a part of my job description as research. This was more clear when I was in Canada, where I was on contract for X hours per semester to teach and Y hours per semester to do research. But both X and Y are hours of "work" where I was employed by the school/department/supervisor.

 

4. Finally, I would say that "polling for office hours" only works in some cases. In Canada, at "big state schools", my classes were still really small (20-30 students) and while I didn't poll for exact time slots, I just asked if they preferred Monday afternoon vs. Tuesday afternoon given that assignments are due Wednesday. Now, at "tiny private school" in US, my class this quarter has 5 students. It is also a graduate class so some of my students are my colleagues/friends/collaborators. So I am usually a little more flexible and in return, my students/colleagues understand what being a TA is like and also do not ask for unreasonable things. But I think my first three points stand even without this last thing being true. (However, it does make it easier/more fun to be a "nice TA" when your students understand the difficulty of being a graduate student, a researcher and a TA at the same time!)

 

I didn't mean to sound harsh about your style--obviously, this is the system that works best for you. and you are the one who gets to decide such things. So if polling your class works, more power to you.

 

I do disagree that work and teaching shouldn't be separated. It's perhaps unfortunate that they are separate, but that's the way grad school is. Again, maybe this varies by program or even country, but you do not finish your dissertation and get a job by teaching. As a professor explained to me one time, you need to prioritize finishing your degree so that you can get that job and continue teaching. I've seen a lot of grad students fall by the way because they spent too much time on teaching (it's easy to do). But it's really not good for your long-term prospects. You shouldn't abandon your students to the wolves ... but get your degree. Just get it. If getting your seminar paper done means forgoing a special trip to campus because Jimmy couldn't make your scheduled office hours ... I hate to break it to Jimmy, but he's going to have to deal.

 

I also want to bring another less-glamorous aspect into this--and that is that teaching and service commitments are often evaluated differently according to gender. Women in the academy regularly take on more service commitments and feel a lot of pressure to be more available to their students. As a result, women tend to get passed over for professional advancement (which requires research output). So, I would urge women to be especially vigilant by those hidden expectations about being more "accommodating" to students at the expense of their own research. 

 

Finally, I think that 8 am is a perfectly valid time to hold office hours. It might not be particularly appealing to undergrads, but 8 am is part of regular work hours. If someone wants to hold their office hours at 8 am, that's okay. Students are going to have to get up at 8 am anyway ... when they graduate and get jobs. My advisor holds very early office hours. I am not a morning person, but when it's important enough, I get up and go. Her undergrads do the same. 8 am is not 6 am or 10 pm. It is when the world is in the office. My only concern with holding office hours so early is that you are inevitably going to get a lot of students who will try to pin you into coming in other times especially to see them. And if you're a pushover like me, it's difficult to turn them down.

[TakeruK]

lifealive, those are all great points I especially agree and notice that gender does change the way our actions are perceived and I think your advice is practical and excellent.

 

I guess our only real disagreement is whether teaching is part of our job or not. Maybe this also depends on each graduate student's career goals? I completely agree that if your goals are tenure-tracked research positions or other research-intensive positions, then teaching is not really relevant to your goals. Sometimes, working as a TA might be just out of necessity to pay the bills. I definitely agree that the current culture in academia is that we graduate students are not going to get academic jobs based on our teaching portfolio!

 

However, I do think it's a shame that our current system places so little value on teaching ability/experience. In my opinion, when professors and established researchers don't put effort into teaching or treat it as a chore, we are actually hurting our future because the undergrads today are the grad students, postdocs, profs, deans, etc. of tomorrow. In addition, the undergrads today taking our freshman survey classes are the voters of tomorrow that decide where the tax money goes!

 

Of course, the responsibility is not just on us. And it would be unfair to ask graduate students to hurt their career to become better teachers. We have to be realistic about what the current culture is like! My argument is just simply that if our contracts or agreements is X hours of teaching and Y hours of research, then I'll spend split my time the way I'm paid and put 100% effort in doing the best job in both aspects. In that sense, I feel that teaching and research are just different aspects of the job of "graduate student". 

[Usmivka]

As much as I would like to have scheduled my classes the way I wanted, due to conflicts and such, I pretty much never actually had a choice on what time to take what class.

Ditto

 

Also, I am also in the "teaching is work" camp. My teaching experience is more likely to get me a job than my research. I'm doing just fine in my field and with publications, but I'm unlikely to be the top graduate globally in my subfield, and even if I was a position that I'm a shoe-in for is unlikely to come open near the time I'm done with my postdoc--like most graduates, a job isn't waiting with my name on it. Most available positions I see advertised specifically include teaching components, request things like teaching portfolios or an example class with their students, and make clear that this is an important consideration to hiring committees. While (some) major R1-type instituions still care about research first and foremost, that is not the case everywhere and I know colleagues that have been rejected as applicants specifically because they didn't have strong enough teaching credentials and interest. These were folks who as grad students viewed teaching as a distraction from research and distinctly deprioritized/tried to minimize time demands related to teaching. There were others who did the same and successfully landed research-focused jobs, but these folks really were among the best graduates (in the US, at least) in their sub-discipline and had a well-timed retirement leave the perfect job open at the perfect time. But there just aren't enough research-only jobs out there in my field that I personally feel comfortable with this approach. Better to be an all-research, all the time person as a postdoc when you generally can't teach, in my personal opinion.

Edited January 19, 2015 by Usmivka

[mandarin.orange]

And unless you want to get evaluations that say you were completely unavailable to help outside of class (a KOD on evaluations)

 

How is this a kiss of death? Are there reallly any consequences? As a grad student, I'd think the dept./university is no way giving up their cheap teaching labor based on a few qualitative evaluation comments. Even if you're a TT prof in a research institution...well, who cares about teaching if your research output is hitting all the marks?

I've been in education a long time, and my experience is that it takes really persistent (bad) patterns on the part of the instructor, and tremendous documentation, to dislodge anyone.

I had a student absolutely lash out on an eval for my summer class. To read it, you would think I was the worst thing to ever happen to the university, to education, and her life. I mostly felt bad for the person who wrote it, thinking  "This is how you cope? This is about the lowest-stakes thing you can possibly do, if you're upset about my teaching."

Edited January 19, 2015 by mandarin.orange

[mandarin.orange]

My teaching experience is more likely to get me a job than my research.

 

This is anecdotal, I realize, but I have yet to see this play out. I've seen peers farther along in my program that were on the market, and hugely forgiven for long bouts (YEARS) of not teaching, nor progressing beyond TA curriculum (i.e. they have never designed their own course/syllabus) when hired. I've seen the faculty in my dept., during a recent TT search, brush aside detailed and awesome teaching statements from candidates in favor of the all-important question: "will they get tenure? what's their research output?" I went to a "Getting a Job at a Teaching-Based Institution" informational panel at my institution...all the panelists ran their own labs and reiterated the message, "you need research output, even here. Teaching the best classes, teaching awards, will not get you tenure. If a candidate has weak teaching experience but awesome research, we figure they'll learn how to teach." Even Karen Kelskey, guru of how-to-get-TT-job advice, de-emphasizes teaching.

It also depends on what you mean by "job." If you mean adjunct positions, teaching high school or prep school, or aiming to be at a S.L.A.C., then yes. 

[fuzzylogician]

As someone who has been following the job market closely in recent years, I can tell you that several good schools in my field are requiring of their short-listed candidates a teaching demo in addition to the job talk. It's not the norm, but it's not unheard of either. I think the point is not so much that teaching is more important than (or even as important as) research but that given the candidate pool these days, they can afford to require their finalists to have *both* excellent research and excellent teaching. It may be that research gets you tenured (and shortlisted/hired), but you can't get away with being a crappy teacher either.* 

 

* This all notwithstanding, the way these hiring decisions have been described to me, everyone has their favorite candidate and they will point out flaws in the other candidates which run the gamut from "bad teacher" to "doesn't have enough experience in [thing their candidate happens to be very strong at]," so at some point you have to accept that it's out of your control whatever you do. I don't think inexperience with teaching is particularly problematic when it comes to top research schools, but I do think that *bad* teaching experience does not reflect well on you. Both would not serve you well if you're applying to SLACs or schools that place more emphasis on teaching. You need the research, but can't ignore the teaching.**

 

** Could someone please explain what doing a crappy job at teaching means exactly? Not preparing enough materials? Not grading in time or giving minimal comments? Not being familiar with the material?  

[rising_star]

This is anecdotal, I realize, but I have yet to see this play out. I've seen peers farther along in my program that were on the market, and hugely forgiven for long bouts (YEARS) of not teaching, nor progressing beyond TA curriculum (i.e. they have never designed their own course/syllabus) when hired. I've seen the faculty in my dept., during a recent TT search, brush aside detailed and awesome teaching statements from candidates in favor of the all-important question: "will they get tenure? what's their research output?" I went to a "Getting a Job at a Teaching-Based Institution" informational panel at my institution...all the panelists ran their own labs and reiterated the message, "you need research output, even here. Teaching the best classes, teaching awards, will not get you tenure. If a candidate has weak teaching experience but awesome research, we figure they'll learn how to teach." Even Karen Kelskey, guru of how-to-get-TT-job advice, de-emphasizes teaching.

It also depends on what you mean by "job." If you mean adjunct positions, teaching high school or prep school, or aiming to be at a S.L.A.C., then yes. 

 

mandarin.orange, this might be field-specific. In my field, you definitely can get ruled out of jobs by lack of teaching experience. I even remember this coming up in interviews for a faculty position at a R1. The graduate students and some of the faculty were concerned that the candidate had only ever been a grader before and that person was the first one eliminated in discussions for the position. FWIW, there was nothing wrong with their job talk, campus interview, etc. The teaching experience was the major negative and what separated the first person eliminated from the three that remained in contention for the position.

 

Yes, you need research output anywhere. But what that is varies depending on where you are. At SLACs, you're expected to integrate students into your research. Yes, you run a lab but that lab is staffed by undergraduates, not graduate students, and it's understood that you won't publish at the same rate as your colleagues at R1s. That's why not as many peer-reviewed articles are expected/required for tenure at a SLAC. Trust me when I say that doing research with an undergraduate team is very different than doing it with grad students. Even when you pay them, you can't expect undergrads to spend 40 hours a week working in your lab, except in the summer. Again, this is why the overall expectation is less.

 

That said, if you don't have good teaching evals at a SLAC or communty college, you'll be asked to leave. While some might say that anyone can learn to teach, it turns out that not everyone can. I have seen it happen before and probably will again in the next few months. A few bad evals in one course isn't enough. But a pattern of bad evals, even with top-notch research, will get you booted from a lot of SLACs. The expectations are completely different at SLACs, particularly about faculty availability. It isn't just do some research, teach your 2-3 courses per semester, serve on a committee, and go home. You're expected to be available, which means being in your office even outside your regular office hours. You're expected to attend campus events in the evenings and on the weekends and it's talked about if you're not there. You often live in a small town, which means you see your colleagues anywhere and everywhere. You'd be amazed by how many rec letters undergrads need (summer internships, summer research programs, study abroad programs) that you'll be asked to write even in your first year. Service often ends up being much more involved and is discussed in pre-tenure reviews (as in, people get told they need to do more service). People also get told they need better teaching evals in pre-tenure reviews. 

 

As someone who has been following the job market closely in recent years, I can tell you that several good schools in my field are requiring of their short-listed candidates a teaching demo in addition to the job talk. It's not the norm, but it's not unheard of either. I think the point is not so much that teaching is more important than (or even as important as) research but that given the candidate pool these days, they can afford to require their finalists to have *both* excellent research and excellent teaching. It may be that research gets you tenured (and shortlisted/hired), but you can't get away with being a crappy teacher either.* 

 

* This all notwithstanding, the way these hiring decisions have been described to me, everyone has their favorite candidate and they will point out flaws in the other candidates which run the gamut from "bad teacher" to "doesn't have enough experience in [thing their candidate happens to be very strong at]," so at some point you have to accept that it's out of your control whatever you do. I don't think inexperience with teaching is particularly problematic when it comes to top research schools, but I do think that *bad* teaching experience does not reflect well on you. Both would not serve you well if you're applying to SLACs or schools that place more emphasis on teaching. You need the research, but can't ignore the teaching.**

 

** Could someone please explain what doing a crappy job at teaching means exactly? Not preparing enough materials? Not grading in time or giving minimal comments? Not being familiar with the material?  

My experience has been that at R1s, you can totally get away with being crappy at teaching. But at (S)LACs, that's not the case. If they sense that you don't enjoy teaching or are bad at it (and they ask questions aimed at this in the phone/Skype interview), they'll cut you from the list. If you come to campus and don't engage well with undergrads, you aren't getting the job at a SLAC, no matter how good your research is. The search pools are deep enough that they can find someone that wants to teach and work with undergrads. And, if they make a mistake and hire that person anyway, they'll get you out around your 3rd year. 

 

I've heard a lot of variations of what a crappy job of teaching is. Some of it is course design: you need a logical syllabus, you need readings that aren't too hard or easy, you need assignments that are well structured and achieve your aims, etc. Not spending enough time preparing materials is a flaw that students can often see right through. Designing a good course is hard! I think you can be a crappy teacher and give detailed comments on the work. That is, you could give great comments but, if the assignment itself wasn't clear or you didn't give them the skills needed to do the assignment, then that's you not doing your job as the instructor (aka, being a crappy teacher). I spend a lot of time making my assignments as clear as I can, spelling out what they're being evaluated on and how many points go in each area (so a rubric but with details), and developing interactive class activities. You don't want the time spent in class to be boring, to duplicate the reading, or to otherwise seem like it is wasting their time.

 

I spent a bunch of time in the Teaching Center at my PhD University learning from the experts (PhDs in Instruction or Assessment) how to teach well, how to devise assignments, etc. I even took a graduate seminar they taught, had them review my teaching philosophy for the job market, went over teaching demos for campus visits with them, and ran lesson plans by them when I was TAing. It was an incredibly valuable resource. As someone that flailed when I first taught, doing those things and being able to talk about it in application materials made a huge difference (I've been told). Why? Because as much as I wanted to be a good teacher, I wasn't good at it. I had to figure out what works for me as a teaching style and how to translate what I do well into the classroom. That isn't always the most natural thing and it looks a lot different for me than it does for some of my colleagues and mentors. For those still in graduate school, I encourage you to take advantage of the Teacher Center at your university. It can really make a huge difference, especially if you're looking for a job at a SLAC or more teaching-intensive institution.