(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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Welcome back! Time to report on our most recent meeting of our reading group, this one concerned with chapter 6. I presented, and my handout is available here.
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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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Today’s discussion was led by Brian Hedden, an MIT grad student. His handout is available here, and it covers chapter 5 of the book. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
Marie Guillot (who’s visiting MIT this year) led our discussion today. Here is the handout she made. In many ways, chapter 3 is a crucial chapter in the book, because it’s supposed to establish the following conditional. Read the rest of this entry »
We had our first meeting of our reading group on Insensitive Semantics. Ephraim led our discussion of chapters 1 and 2, and he made the handout available.
Most of our time was spent on chapter 1, in which C&L set out how they see the lay of the land. The basic question that their book is a contribution to Read the rest of this entry »