Day 8 - Teaching

If you had to teach something, what would you teach? (If you DO teach, when did you discover your love for teaching/the subject?)

Although I'm currently staying home with Yogi I have been teaching since I started graduate school in 2000.  As a graduate student I taught lab courses in classes that faculty generally avoid (Statistics, Research Methods, Intro Psych), but I took a Visiting Prof position during the year I wrote my dissertation and I began to have more control over the content of the courses I taught.  That was the year I really fell in love with teaching.  My first Asst Prof position was in a psychology department where I taught courses that I really loved (Social Psychology, History of Psychology, Psychology of Women).  I left that job to be in the same state as my now wife and accepted another Asst Prof position.  Unfortunately this job was in a business school.  My training in Industrial/Organizational psychology provided me with a background in business and plenty of I/O folks teach in management departments, but I never thought I would be one of them.  During those years I taught courses that I did not really love or actually have must interest in (Intro Management, Human Resources, Staffing, Leadership).  Yuck.

I love teaching, the energy of the class session itself, the syllabus/course planning, the lecture prep, the exchange with students.  I do not love grading or keeping track of grades and I especially do not love faculty meetings.  Faculty meetings are horrific actually.

I am at my best when I am personally engaged with and excited about the topic.  For this reason, I can think of a few things that I would love to teach.  Of course in order to teach these things, I would have to learn more myself but that is half the fun.  Here's my list:

• Gender


• Religion (particularly Buddhism)


• Literature

I could be much more specific with each of those, but my eyelids are droopy.

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