Job updates

While we were away I got my teaching offers in the mail. It seems I will be considered a full-time lecturer at CU for the 2010-2011 school year. This means I will be teaching a 4-4 load. I need to contact my rep in HR to find out what benefits, if any, this entitles me to. I have mixed feelings on this. The money is nice, and we will be able to save a significant portion each month, which means I may not have to teach so much next summer. It will be really time consuming, however, and I'm not looking forward to another year in which I have very little time to do my own work. I'm also not looking forward to another year on the job market in which I don't have much time to think about applications before I send them out. To that end, I'm going to spend the next several weeks getting course stuff, job letters, and writing samples organized. I also need to finish up an article I've been working on for months and get it out. I need to have that on my CV.

In other news, I will be "team teaching" Intro to Women's Studies this year. I put team teaching in quotations because this means that I will divide the course in half with another, tenure-track prof, who will be getting her term off without teaching in the spring. We've spent the past few weeks organizing the class, and it has been a huge hassle. Why? Because this is her service course, which means she teaches it all the time. She's very committed to the course, which I totally get. She's taught it a lot, and she knows what works. She wants to stick to that formula, which is cool. Except it isn't. Having just taught this course over the summer and having spoken to a lot of students about it, I think there are some fundamental problems in the way the course is designed. I think it is entirely too theoretical for an intro course (I don't think freshman are equipped to read Irigary, Butler, Spivak, or Lacquer), and I think there is a strong argument to be made for making the course a true intro class and using an actual women's studies textbook rather than a collection of readings. We fundamentally disagree, and since I am only the "part-time" person, I am the one having to give in. On some level, I don't feel like it is worth the fight, largely because I'm not tenure track, but I really think she's designed the course she wants to teach rather than the course that is best for the students. Before we left to visit family I sat down and compiled a list of readings that I wanted to include. I just got an email with the list she decided on; there are only 4 or 5 of the readings I wanted to include on the list. Oh, and she will teach all of those readings. This woman is also very difficult to communicate with. She doesn't proofread her emails and ends questions with multiple questions marks, which I find so incredibly annoying. I'm trying to remember this is something to put on my CV, but I think she and I will likely exchange words before it is all over with.