(This is another post in a series on job-market related things. Previous entries can be found here.)
Teaching statements are kind of easy, but they’re hard to feel good about. Mostly, that’s because they’re about how to be a good teacher, or perhaps more specifically, about why you are a good teacher. And explaining what makes someone a good teacher is a lot like trying to teach someone how to teach. If you try to do it in words, you’ll probably end up saying the obvious and obviously inane: “be engaging, be well-prepared, foster an active learning-environment, make room for everybody, etc.” Yeah, that really clears it up!
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Let’s turn to dissertation abstracts. (This is another post in a series on job-market related things. Previous entries can be found here.)
The dissertation abstract that you produce as part of your job market dossier gives a brief overview of your dissertation, much like an abstract of an article gives a brief overview of the article. But it also does a whole lot more, and I want to mostly focus on that “more.”
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I talked about some aspects of writing a job market writing sample here. In that post, I emphasized the ways in which a writing sample is different from a paper aimed at publication. Today, I want to talk about one of the points of correspondence between them.
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It’s the season for students entering the job market to put the final touches on their writing sample. Hopefully by now, most of the arguments are in place. In fact, for people who write a dissertation that is a single, sustained piece of argument, rather than Read the rest of this entry »