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In graduate school, I specialized in 19th-century American literature, expecting that, as a faculty member, I would probably teach a survey course and seminars in autobiography, romanticism, the history of the book, and the poet Walt Whitman. I thought I might also be asked to teach composition.
Seven years later -- as a tenured professor at a medium-sized, liberal-arts college -- I figure I can teach just about anything in the humanities at an introductory level from the Renaissance to the present, and, with some extra notice, I just might be able to stretch that chronology back to the Caves of Lascaux or take my students on an archaeological tour of Jerusalem.
Out of the 50 or so courses I have taught in my current position, no more than a third have been related to the fields for which I trained in graduate school and on which all of my scholarly publications have focused.
I am not complaining. I am grateful for the experience, which is probably typical for professors who are not employed by research universities. In many respects, teaching outside my field -- mostly general-literature courses and surveys of Western civilization -- has refined and deepened the education I only half received as an undergraduate. My transformation from a specialist into a generalist has not been easy. Under the pressure of teaching 12 credits a semester -- sometimes a dozen different topics a week -- I have had to take a few shortcuts.
More than a few times, particularly when I am just getting started in a new course, my life as a teacher has been saved by recorded lectures. If you haven't received one of those catalogs, sellers such as the Teaching Company or Recorded Books, along with many smaller companies, offer recordings of lectures similar to the kind you might find at a research university on any given day.
The largest catalog -- approaching 300 titles -- is offered by the Teaching Company, which was founded in 1990 by Thomas M. Rollins. Apparently, when he was a student at Harvard Law School, Rollins crammed for an exam on the federal rules of evidence by watching a 10-hour series of videotaped lectures. The experience stuck with him, and Rollins eventually realized...