Teaching vs. Research

I was talking to a friend and colleague the other day and we were both kvetching about how we didn't have enough time to do the things we wanted to do. She was complaining that she had several writing projects with impending due dates and couldn't spend as much time on teaching as she would like and I complained that my teaching preparation was leaving little time for research.

What interested me about this conversation is that it made me realize that my view of the teaching part of my role as a scholar is different than hers. In telling me that she spends less time preparing for teaching than she would like to, I realized that she sees both teaching and research as activities that are manipulable, at least in regards to how much time one devotes to them. More surprisingly, I realized that I have a fairly static view of teaching and the time it takes.

I realized I tend to see my teaching as something static, something that takes up a given amount of time that can't really be changed. If I have a new prep, that time is larger, and if I have a hybrid class, there's a slight increase in the time I spend on the course because of the online interaction, but it's a fairly solid block. This means that when I plan out my work week, teaching starts off as a block of time that will take up most of the week and I try to calculate what little pieces here and there that might be left for research. Even when I have a project to finish, I don't think of teaching as something that I can really carve space out of, and if I need to spend more time finishing a conference paper, I think of it as overtime effort above what I would normally do in a week.

My colleague obviously sees teaching as something a bit more flexible, that one can spend more or less energy on, not because the preparation demands it (you need a lecture/activity at bare minimum for each class), but because you might need to pay more attention to other things.

What I wonder is why we have these different attitudes?

• I'm a younger scholar than she but a few years and have been teaching less (and at the same time, more often outside my area), so maybe some of it is comfort with teaching. 
• She also have a tt job in her area and is expected to publish, while I have contingent work that depends more on continued positive student evaluations and less on whether I'm getting research done.
• The other possibility of course is that we're just different that way and it's a personal difference in approach to time and responsibilities.

But it's an interesting difference to contemplate. And I suspect that if I'm going to get to where I want to be in this profession, I'm going to have to figure out how to be a little more like her, which is fine with me 'cause I think she's fabulous!