Hey Man, Whats the Plan, What Was That You Said?

Adam Potthast's started an interesting discussion over at In Socrates' Wake. He's talking about how it could be useful for the job market for grad students to work more on our teaching, as opposed to our research. Roughly, his thinking is, since way more departments have teaching as their primary focus and those departments look for real teaching ability when they're hiring, it might not be the worst strategy to spend time making yourself a better teacher.

Yeah, maybe, I guess. But the thing I'm suspicious of here is Teaching! Experience!. It's all fine and good for departments to talk about developing their grad students' teaching skills, but in a lot of places that ends up looking like indentured labor in the hot, dirty mines of "Contemporary Moral Issues" and baby logic. And that way lies an extra year or two in grad school and a very short CV when you finally hit the market.

I'm not really sure I'm disagreeing with Potthast here. We all want to be the best teachers we can. (Um, with the exception of a few people who really don't give a fuck.) But it's sort of hard to evaluate his suggestion without a better sense of what he thinks grad student should be doing, and how much time they should spend doing it.