I'm going to rant for a moment.

As a grad student, I had a fellowship and then a training grant, neither of which had a teaching requirement. One semester I was on a TA, so I taught 2 discussion sections of a Cell Bio class. My advisor apologized that I'd have to teach that semester, but he thought I should have some teaching experience, it was a necessary evil.

Does that clue you in to what he thinks about the importance of teaching ability?

My postdoc mentors have had similar attitudes. They tell me, "No one looks at your teaching experience. They only care about your research."

I thought, sure, at a Research I institution (such as the one I'm at, I don't recall the exact definition but it means research-heavy) that is probably, though sadly, true. But, I reasoned, such logic is short-sighted. What if I don't get a job at a Research I institution? What if I'm "reduced" to accepting a job at a primarily teaching institution? A --gasp-- college?? That happened to a friend of mine from college, the one who I got notes from when I skipped class. So I set out to enhance the teaching component of my resume.

As a postdoc funded from grant dollars, the logistics of teaching are insurmountable. The TA stipend is not sufficient to cover the matching % of my salary, but the grant won't pay for me to teach. I was able to audit a course called College Science Teaching. One of the assignments is a curriculum project, for a two-week section of the class of our choice.

That is when I conceived of this class "Science Controversies for Voters". It's what I consider the bare minimum that every citizen ought to know about science, simply because they vote. (Eventually I found a place to teach the class, to adult learners, as discussed elsewhere.)

I am applying for some jobs, although where I'm at in my research makes me not a competitive candidate until next year when I'll have, I hope, one or two publications. To my surprise, I made the short list for one job, at a Research I institution, and got a phone interview. During the interview, we never talked about teaching, confirming what my advisor and mentors had told me: Research I institutions don't care about your teaching ability.

This is so wrong. When you look for a school for a child, a parent wants one that the kid will be happy at, and be trained or taught sufficiently to do well on standardized tests to get scholarships or admittance to college. When deciding on a college, price is a big factor, beyond that, no one cares about reputability so long as future employers respect the school. Why is the reputation tied in to research? Does anyone know or care how many Nobel laureates teach at your state university? Don't you think eventually future employers are going to start saying "Gee, he went to XU, but the last 5 kids we've gotten from there didn't know the first thing about chemistry, and the 3 kids from that private college really know their stuff, so let's hire her instead."

It's really starting to irritate me to hear "Don't worry about your lack of teaching experience, no one gives a darn about your teaching ability."

I want to do research. If I have to choose between research and teaching, I'll choose research. If I'm going to do both, I want to do a good job at both.