🎉 Learned I received the departmental teaching award. I'm pretty pleased about that. This is my first-ever teaching award. Normally, it's not a big deal because it just rotates to the newest course director, but I wasn't a course director. As far as I can tell, this is the first time someone who is not a course director has won it.
I think it's quite well deserved. Our typical teaching load is 1-4 lectures/yr. I've been teaching far more than that for years.
I am the only person in my dept teaching something I do not work on. Since we started our quantitative cell biology course, I've taught a module on multivariate analysis, which is now 4 lectures, and since I started here, I've taught a module on metabolism 2-4 lectures. Neither of these are things I work on.
This year, I also picked up a full course 2hrs/wk in another department to offset some of my salary.
It's nice that my chair recognizes my efforts. (It's an award conferred by the chair).
Some of this is my fault.
When I started teaching, the course director was already teaching my research topic, so I picked something we were not teaching that I thought was important--metabolism. I should have pitched a fit that as an assistant professor I should get to teach my topic. But now that's all water under the bridge.
When we started the new quantitative biology course, I thought it was really important to teach multivariate analysis. This is not something I do myself, I usually use the core or a colleague. But when no-one stepped in to teach it, I did kind of assuming it would get me out of teaching in the other class.
Well, my chair doesn't want to dictate to the course directors how to teach, and the course director for the course I teach metabolism in is kinda a bud so I keep teaching even though...
yes I am a chump.
Although I think it’s much better for the students for you to teach just outside your field (assuming intro level) most of my colleagues cram so much into their lectures because they feel so attached to it all. I can focus on is this really important or is it outdated because every year I need a little refresher before teaching.
@MCDuncanLab First of all congratulations! It is something that really annoys me when someone tells me they cannot possibly teach xyz because it's not their exact speciality... my idea is that every faculty should be able to teach any lecture in a year 1 undergraduate course and probably a good number of lectures in more advanced undergraduate courses.
The lectures I'm most proud of and from which I've learned most are those that were really outside of my field.
