Teaching
Today I taught a lecture for my postdoc advisor, who is out of town. It reminded me how much I love teaching. I really like communicating with people in general (even in foreign languages that I speak quite poorly). I also like playing with concepts to distill them into presentable form.
I didn’t do any formal teaching in grad school or postdoc, since the implicit message was that we should focus on research instead, so we could get faculty jobs. This is somewhat ironic, since a big part of the job of a research professor is, in fact, to teach.
Now I am looking forward to my fall class, which will be a seminar class on current research topics in my field. I am a little afraid it will take up all my time, but I think it will be enjoyable.
I suppose all research all the time is nice (as far as productivity is concerned), but I’m sure you will enjoy the opportunity to multi-task and do something different. I would also be afraid that teaching would eat all of my time. Not sure how to avoid that, at least not the first time you teach a class.
Comment by Candid Engineer — April 8, 2008 @ 2:23 pm