"Teaching Statements Are Bunk"

Truer words were never spoken.

The first insight was that, as a literary genre, these documents are as drab as they are predictable. The majority are dominated by abstract appeals to unobjectionable ambitions. They ritualistically invoke a desire to teach "critical thinking," but offer little concrete guidance as to how that might be accomplished. Their authors disavow assuming the status of "expert." They appeal to collaborative learning, embrace "diverse learning styles," bring their own research into the classroom, disdain established canons, incorporate marginalized voices, recount personal teaching epiphanies, and acknowledge personal mentors, most of whom would be unknown to the committee members reading the file.

In five minutes, anyone who has spent time in academe could compile a comparable list of such platitudes, the worst of which veer toward sentimental treacle. The themes are so generic that I flirted with simply passing off someone else's teaching philosophy as my own. Who would notice? Indeed, many sample statements are explicitly presented as models for others to "emulate."

The first suspicion that there is something insincere about teaching statements derives from the fact that almost every author professes to love teaching. Cumulatively, this pandemic of instructional ardor strikes a dissonant note when compared with the routine activities of academics, many of whom spend an inordinate amount of energy trying to secure release time from teaching. That is, when they're not complaining about the petty hassles of coordinating teaching assistants, dealing with "grade grubbers," writing reference letters for undergraduates they could barely identify in a police lineup, evaluating essays, ordering textbooks, completing copyright permission forms, revising syllabi, learning the latest instructional software, and worrying about the time all of that takes away from other academic pursuits. Such grumblings dominate the hallway conversations of most faculty members I know.

And this is good, too:

But the inescapable fact is that teaching is a highly contextual and increasingly constrained activity.

There are too many constraints to list them all here, but some examples will make the point. University teaching is constrained by tables bolted to classroom floors; hundreds of students in a classroom; the need to evaluate students, and for them to evaluate us; unrelenting grade escalation; official requirements to produce increasingly formal, legalistic, and binding course outlines; increasing numbers of students who also hold paying jobs; research-ethics protocols that make it more difficult for students to conduct self-directed research on topics they find personally interesting; a sense that it has become anathema to fail students; exasperating appeal procedures for students caught cheating; and the fact that teaching is only one thing for which professors are evaluated.