My supervisor is against spending time on teaching on irrelevant courses and I have therefore turned down teaching from other lecturers. However she has asked other PhD students to teach on her courses which are exactly relevant to my research.

I'm a bit peeved as one person in particular has made the comment that maybe she thinks I'm just not very good at teaching and has showed off a bit about being better than at things I'm supposed to be expert at (I am almost certain this isn't true).

This is all making me feel a bit down and i can't help worrying that this is going to weaken my CV as after following my supervisors advice this means I will be doing no teaching this year :-(

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What stage of your PhD are you at? My supervisor advised me against teaching in my writing-up year, as it took up too much time and it took me ages to get back into my research after a long stint of teaching - basically, each autumn was practically a write-off for any serious PhD work. Could this be a valid reason for your situation? In my case, I had to weigh up the pros and cons - valuable teaching experience and money versus the detrimental effect on my PhD in time spent elsewhere.

Don't listen to the person who's making those comments, teaching can be learnt and improved on over years. Some people I work with say they are still learning and improving even after doing it for several decades and they are definitely not crap lecturers, they're well respected by both staff and students. Your PhD is the most important thing now and teaching is secondary to that. Also, unless you've got absolutely zero teaching experience on your CV and this year was going to be essential for starting you off, would one year doing no teaching make much difference in the longer term?

Hi thanks. I'm just starting my second year and I have one year of teaching already.

I would personally prefer to focus on my research for a while but I've just been afraid that if I was ever to apply for some sort of job after my PhD they would wonder why I had stopped teaching and not done it for two years.

Maybe I should start of the new year more positively! I still can't explain why my supervisor is overlooking me.

Teaching in the 2nd year sounds ok, it's not too close to the final deadlines.... do you think you could ask her about it directly? Not about the person who's made the not-nice comments obviously, but say you would really like to get a decent block of teaching experience behind you before you get too near the end of the PhD, as you will want to devote yourself wholeheartedly to that when the time comes. And that teaching seems to be so much about learning it as you go along, so it obviously would be useful for you, then see what she says.

Are the students she's asked to teach on her courses also her own PhD students, or someone else's? I know in my uni teaching opportunities are quite limited, and end up being spread amongst a very small number of students - there's no way all the research students could teach without taking jobs away from long-standing hourly paid lecturers - is that possible in your place? Allocating teaching is a bit politically sensitive at my college, so some PhD students do lose out.

I guess I'm trying to think of reasons so you don't get more fed up with this situation, but I admit I worried when I turned down teaching for last term in case someone else nipped in and offered a new course on my PhD topic, so I couldn't go back and do it next year after I finish my PhD. In the end, I realised that if someone else did take over my slot there wasn't anything I could do, it's just the competitive internal politics of the place, but at least I'd have finished my PhD ok and there should be other teaching opportunities either there or elsewhere, as lecturers come and go all the time.

It's quite difficult trying to get all the things on your CV you think you need for a decent job in the future, all at the same time you're trying to do your research. I was looking at mine this morning and it depressed me slightly, so I went back to my PhD work, at least that's in my hands at present!