I’m going to say you should teach. That’s the most important thing. But what’s after that? What is most important (at a college) to get hired or get tenure? (Not relevant to community college teachers because… er, you’ll have to wait for my CCTE presentation–I hope.)
“The relative importance attributed to research, teaching, and service is reflected also in the ranking of activities within each of these categories of evaluation. For example, within the category of research, publishing is deemed a more noteworthy activity than presenting papers (akin to lecturing) or editing or reviewing for a journal (akin to grading). And within the category of publishing, publishing articles in scholarly journals (for other researchers) is considered more important than publishing textbooks (for students), and both of these activities carry far more weight than publishing essays in the popular media (for the general populace) – an activity typically deemed utterly insignificant for the purposes of tenure and promotion review. Finally, within the category of publishing scholarly works, publishing purely theoretical articles often ranks above publishing articles which “merely†apply theory to a problem and, typically, both of these rank above publishing educationally oriented articles†(48).
Shelley M. Park
The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Jan. – Feb., 1996), pp. 46-84