Update

Bad blogger - that's me. Because of that I plan on having 2 posts today. First, I want to give you the "career update."

I'm very near the halfway point in my first semester of teaching - and I'm surviving, although it's taking up a lot of my time, despite the fact that I've only got one class. In my last post I hinted at how my approach to lecturing at the beginning of the semester wasn't working. Since then, I've taken a lot more time with each chapter - reading it, figuring out exactly the best order in which to present the material (I don't always agree with the book's order) and finding extra figures and information to present the material in a variety of ways. Very time consuming, but I think it's paying off.

Even though there's half a semester left it's time to think about courses for next semester. Registration for some of the students has begun already. I had kind of assumed that as a part-time I instructor that each semester would go kind of like it did back in August when I was hired - the associate dean (AD) looked at courses being taught and just kind of asked us if we could teach this or that and the holes got filled.

No. Not so much - of course nothing is that simple. Turns out that there's a process......the part time instructors got a sheet of paper last week with a list of the evening courses being offered next semester. We were to rank the courses we were interested in teaching. Happily, there was also an option to try and teach a day course as well if they were available. I really like the time of day that I teach (3-5:30) and very much would prefer a day course. On the other hand, I would rather teach a class than no class at all even if that means an evening course. As coherently as possible I filled out my form with a note on the bottom to that effect. Currently the AD is working with the full-time faculty and letting them take the courses that they want. He won't start dealing with scheduling the part-time faculty until a week or two from now, so I've got a bit of a wait before I know what and when I'll be teaching.

In the meantime I've been looking at the job postings again. It's definitely that time of year in which the faculty jobs start getting posted. I'm going to be applying for another adjunct position at a college more like what I want to end up at. It's to teach a 400 level cell and molecular biology course which is exactly what I got my Ph.D. in, so it's a good fit. I'll be sending my stuff along by early next week. I think it would be a good progression from one course to two, but still remaining part time for a bit as I continue to adjust to life as a teacher. We'll see what comes of it.

So there's the update about the job and career. I'll be back soon with a post about my current class.