I was talking with a colleague (an on-call librarian) last night about the reality of being a librarian here in Portlandia. Usually you have to cobble together umpteen part-time and on-call jobs in hopes of coming away with a semi-decent resume. {Before I was offered my current temporary FT position I was looking at three jobs which would total about 35 hours a week–with wildly varying salaries and commutes.} An unfortunate downside to this cobbling tends to be a marked lack of teaching experience.

I just took a look at last quarter’s instruction stats and realized that over the course of about 10 weeks I taught 15 courses in 7 distinct program areas. That’s 300 students, 995 minutes of teaching, 465 minutes of prep work,  and about 100 cough drops. Srsly, I always sound like a 14-year old boy about ten minutes into my teaching. I have no idea why.

The reason I am taking note of these stats is that I get the idea they are fairly abnormal. I just read a blog entry at ACRLog in which a first-year faculty librarian relays that he taught 8 courses over a semester. I am certainly not dissing his 8 courses…that’s awesome.  We have a lot more students than his institution does, certainly an important factor.  Nevertheless, I’m realizing that I am really blessed with my work scenario.

Sure I wake up every night drenched in sweat, doing the late-night freakout over my total lack of job security, but at least I can eventually go back to sleep certain that I am at least getting really killer experience.