Ayup. Sound like you think about teaching is the biggest thing. It helps if you've had a look at the department's website and have some sense of what kinds of courses you might be expected to teach.
I just read a really good book called "What the Best College Teachers Do." The cover design is asinine, but the book itself is really good, if quite broad, about attitudes towards teaching (and it has a short bit about teaching portfolios in it). Might be worth having a look at to get into the groove of teaching talk.
Don't write down too many AOCs on your vita. I've seen people forced to admit that they put areas x, y and z there because they took an undergrad course in those areas, not because they could teach one.
And don't forget to take your beta blocker if you tend to get twitchy during interviews.
Yeah, that's good advice about AOC. After a certain point they stop making someone look more attractive. (On the other hand, in my area there are enough courses with enough demand that I'm not required to leave the realm of value-- but metaphysicians might not have this luxury.)
I don't know if this is specifically true for philosophy, but at least in the sciences:
Don't forget to rave about how bad you're dying to help undergrads get some research experience. It's a buzzword at the moment, and people listen for it at small liberal arts colleges.
5: Yeah, really. Mr Oudemia is a philosophy prof at a small liberal arts college, where the biologists and chemists, etc. are falling all over themselves to get undergrads' names on research papers. The administration loveloveloves this.
I'll second B's recommendation of What the Best College Teachers Do, which I too have just read (though it does, to my mind, stress personal rather than intellectual development of students a bit too much: it also heaps praise on the use of trolley problems in teaching ethics, which would probably get the author banned here). Just to make everyone more nervous, though, I'll point out that even basically teaching institutions sometimes worry about candidates who seem like they'll devote all their energies to teaching and not publish enough to get tenure. It's all about the Golden Mean, people!
Don't forget to rave about how bad you're dying to help undergrads get some research experience.
Oh, great tip!
I have just today crossed the line into the period in which I might possibly expect to receive interview requests from any of the schools I applied to. This is proving somewhat insane making.
5: Don't forget to rave about how bad you're dying to help undergrads get some research experience. It's a buzzword at the moment, and people listen for it at small liberal arts colleges.
You know who'd to blame for that? P.Z. Meyers. He's got undergrads doing research on zebrafish way out in the middle of nowhere, 40 miles past Lake Wobegon almost in North Dakota. The motherfucker.
It warms the cockles of my cruel heart to know that if I were to wangle an interview at one of these schools, by hacking their computer or bribing a secretary for example, I'd do exactly as well as about 90% of the hapless real PhDs who actually do get legit interviews.
My haps! My haps! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY HAPS?
"Third, it's good to think about the institution in advance in order to anticipate questions that emerge from different student populations."
this especially. don't know how it is in philosophy, but in my discipline, there's a wide variation between teaching demands at different levels of institution.
also, a story of what not to do, courtesy of a friend.
said friend had a solid-gold pedigree, wide and imposing erudition, a cutting-edge dissertation on an arcane topic, and an interview at a second-tier teaching college.
'...and how would you teach an introduction to literature?" asked the interviewers.
"well, i suppose that would depend on the area. do you mean an introduction to renaissance english literature, or an introduction to modern american literature, or an introduction to the literature of colonialism? or what sort of introduction do you mean?"
"oh, no," nervous laughter from the interviewers, "nothing that fancy. just a general introduction to literature."
"what? a general introduction to literature? to all literature? in one term?"
"yes; how would you teach it?"
"well, i wouldn't! i mean, what an ill-conceived venture--what can you possibly hope to accomplish? i simply wouldn't do it at all!"
and, as you may surmise, the interviewers were happy to arrange his not doing it.
12: You also appear to be short a certain amount of gorm.
I am almost completely out of gorm, and all the stores are backordered.
But as long as you have enough feck to get by with, you're good.
The feck is the first thing to go. Once the system is malfunctioning, the gorm and hap soon follow.
I'd do exactly as well as about 90% of the hapless real PhDs who actually do get legit interviews.
I got an APA interview once, because I was sitting at the wrong table.
Personally, the humanities have been short on hap for decades, maybe a century or more.
But as long as you have enough feck to get by with, you're good.
I have plenty of feck and am quite gruntled about it.
KB's story is hilarious. Yes, there are general intro to lit classes! Shock and horror.
Poor overspecialized job candidate.
Bereft of feck, shorn of gorm, utterly a stranger to hap, I still remain plussed.
and all the stores are backordered
At least they're still funct.
My advice: don't talk about the content of the course, talk about the methods for delivering it. Content is fairly standardized: you have your historical introductory course and your thematic introductory course. Whatever. All you show by talking about content is that you know what the standard options are.
On the other hand, if you can say "I use this classroom exercise to help students understand different theories of personal identity." You are actually demonstrating good teaching.
I say this as someone who has been turned down for every teaching job in North America. I know the interviewing process, oh yes!
I'm not on the market this year, but a ton of people in my department are. And the one whose work is the most jargon-y and wankerish and who is the least generous colleague and who thinks students are giant pests and a waste of his time is the only one who has an interview already. Bah.
(I know, there's a lot of time. But still: Bah.)
4: We develop AOCs separately (tentatively labelled 'the areas of philosophy I don't hate due to dissertation'), but it's better to have a couple strong areas rather than 'I took a course in it once'-type areas.
25--
is it because you talk about that classroom exercise that involves hands-on commissurotomy?
for some reason, that can scare off potential employers.
("then as a follow-up exercise, i remind the students that we prospectively described it as "do it yourself commissurotomy". but is it still "do it yourself" in retrospect?")
26: It is super early for those phone calls.
Also, there's honestly nothing more obnoxious about the "I've got so many interviews!" people. One woman I know ran around whining to anyone who would listen how much trouble she was in and how difficult the APA was going to be for her, since she had so many interviews it just wasn't going to be possible to schedule them all.
"then as a follow-up exercise, i remind the students that we prospectively described it as "do it yourself commissurotomy". but is it still "do it yourself" in retrospect?"
Depends on which hand you did it with.
The thing about AOCs is that we'll either want you to teach in it or not. If not, it does nothing. If we do, we'll ask about it and if you sound like you don't know what to do you will look like an idiot. It's not like listing it on the CV will make you look better by itself.
So "I like to sit around with my seminar students and get high" would be bad to disclose in the interviewing process?
One woman I know ran around whining to anyone who would listen how much trouble she was in and how difficult the APA was going to be for her, since she had so many interviews it just wasn't going to be possible to schedule them all.
"Do you think you would be better at scheduling them if there were somebody there to shoot you every minute of your life?"
Since my experience is almost entirely with how not to get jobs, perhaps I should stick to describing things not to do.
When I first started out, would have several versions of my CV, each with a different array of AOCs, and I would send out the one that seemed best for the department. This made my life more complicated, but didn't accomplish anything. The main problem was that I was interested in everything, had experience in nothing, and am chronically indecisive.
26: It is super early for those phone calls.
I know. I'm just in an everything-about-academia-sucks mode, and am taking this as confirmation.
35: Yep. (Adulterated, obviously.)
The best piece of academic advice I ever received (which I didn't follow) was "Don't pick a dissertation topic you are interested in. Pick a topic your adviser is interested in. That way, he'll be motivated to work with you."
"Hey, hey, APA, how many kids did you kill today?"
39: I think my favorite is "Everything That Rises Must Converge."
36: Oh, no, that part is just true.
Well, years ago Classics used to have a system at their APA whereby there were no phone calls or anything that occurred prior to showing up at the conference. There was an office set up in whatever hotel that the schools would notify when they wanted to interview someone. Then the student assistants would write your identifying "confidential" (ha!) number on a whiteboard to indicate that you should go into the office and ask. The whiteboard was in a very public place. People would erase other people's numbers to try to get them to miss interviews, or they would write someone's number down in order to play a mean trick. This practice I think ended my first year of grad school, but I was at an APA watching people trying to inconspicuously cruise the board. So terrible.
a man with a good car don't need no justification.
that's what to tell them at the damned job convention.
'you want my teaching philosophy? a man with a good car don't *need* no teaching philosophy!"
43: Holy shit. How horrific.
42:
My favorites are the normal favorites:
A Good Man is Hard to Find and The Life You Save May Be Your Own.
Further evidence that I am a bad dad, I've read (in dramatic fashion) both A Good Man is Hard to Find and Fear and Loathing to my son.
Then, I have to explain to my son that although killin' and drugs seem like a rocking good time, they are really objectively bad things.
Blume: I've been trying to remember the bright side of the academic life. The academy may suck, but the stuff we came to study, to learn and to teach, still rules. I'm trying not to let the accidental suckiness cloud the essential awesomeness.
And with that, I'm going to a division meeting.
"'She would have been a good woman,' the Misfit said, 'if it had been someone there to shoot her every day of her life'".
Usually misquoted. The "it had been" for "there had been" is a dialect thing O'Connor uses a lot. It's very striking.
Yeah, I (obviously!) elided that part in my tense shifting for the sake of my "humorous" purpose, but it is indeed striking.
O'Connor knew that cats were evil. For that, she deserves special praise.
The best piece of academic advice I ever received (which I didn't follow) was "Don't pick a dissertation topic you are interested in. Pick a topic your adviser is interested in. That way, he'll be motivated to work with you."
To this I'd add that whatever you think your dissertation topic is, it's really what your adviser thinks it is.
If my dissertation advisor has little clue what my dissertation topic is, does that mean I don't have a dissertation?
I couldn't possibly pick a favorite Flannery O'Connor novel. My daughter came very close to being named Flannery. Of course, she also came perilously close to being named Bootsy, which is why God demanded two people be involved in making children.
A little something for you humanities types. Today we had a meeting about exams. There was a question that could be set in two ways, as we saw it. The first way would require a technical answer, which is easy to mark but might throw some students. The second would be more abstract, and require the students to describe in words what was going on.
Prof 1: Wait, if we set it that second way, they're going to write reams of gibberish, and we'll have to go through it all.
Prof 2: Yes! Don't forget, some of them can't write a complete sentence.
Prof 3: Well, the TA's are marking it, so I guess we don't have to wade through it.
Prof 1: True, but half the TA's can't speak English.
Prof 2: In that case, the marks won't demonstrate anything, will they?
ah, the joys of higher education.
It's posts like this that confirm my belief that dropping out of philosophy grad school was the smartest career move I ever made.
32: I never got high with any of my undergrad profs, but I did with a couple of junior faculty in grad school.
Sadly, I found out this past week that one of my philosophy profs from grad school and my undergrad classics prof passed away recently.
I know a girl whose parents named her after Flannery O'Connor. She is a latter-day hippie.
52:
Good advice, however unwelcome, from Rob, about the dissertation topic.
To this I'd add that whatever you think your dissertation topic is, it's really what your adviser thinks it is.
Alas, not if you're stubborn. After I lost my primary advisor, I went through 2 new ones who wanted to redirect my dissertation, I struggled, we couldn't understand one another in conference ....
Yeah, the dissertation is best treated as a vehicle, not an end.
58: As I understand, you're not in academia now, right?
I'm sure I hear 10 or 20 stories telling me I'm lucky to have stayed out for every one which tells me that I wish I'd stayed. (One classmate did research among snake-handling indigines in Amazonian Peru. Nearest he could tell, they handled poisonous snakes for kicks.)
These aren't stories convincing me that my life has gone well, just stories convincing me that my problem wasn't failing to get a PhD in 1975 or 1985 or 1995 or recently.
Among the stories are stories from people I dislike who LOVED grad school.
60--
well, right; hearing that someone with horrible taste loved a movie is sometimes more useful than hearing that someone with good taste liked it.
The most important thing your dissertation can be is finished.
The most important thing your first book can be is published.
After that, tenure; after tenure, THEN you can write all that stuff that is the reason you got into this racket in the first place.
Oh, and Labs is right. What they most want is someone who can speak in complete sentences and refrain from picking his/her nose for minutes at a time.
Beyond that, it helps simply to have done your homework. Ask the person inviting you for the interview a little about who will be there, what they think they're looking for in the search -- push them as far as you can, politely. Then, do a little thinking about how you would teach the basic courses in your field. You won't have a syllabus in your back pocket for everything, but you might have a reading list for every basic thing.
62.1--
a.k.a. "don't get it right; get it written!"
59:
my problem wasn't failing to get a PhD in 1975 or 1985 or 1995 or recently.
Of course not. (No, I'm not in academia any more.)
Just heard from a philosophy friend that a university in Canada called him up. They really, really like him. But they require that professors give at least half of their courses in French. They wanted to know, was there any chance he just forgot to mention his French fluency on his c.v.?