Teaching Statement

Students looking for a class that they can coast through, skipping lectures, then get an A by memorizing material for the exams at the last minute are in for a shock if they take one of my classes. My approach to teaching is to help students discover the material for themselves and to get them to the point where they will thrive and contribute after graduation. The most important skill any person can learn is how to learn. I aim even higher by pushing students to take the last step to becoming teachers. Thus the goal is to make my students greater authorities in the subject so that they can contribute. The first step to accomplishing this is to acknowledge that students learn at least as much from each other as from the professor and to encourage and support students teaching students by allowing collaboration and working together whenever possible.

Old fashioned repetition and failure, repeated failure, is one of the most usefult tools for teaching lab fundamentals. Cookbook labs that always work the first time are unrealistic and quickly forgotten. I build in many opportunities to fail and then offer the opportunities to correct. I learned this trick from Prof. Don Slish where he repeated the same two experiemnts for several weeks at the beginning of the semester allowing the students multiple tries until they could get through them both correctly. This can frustrate students who think it is all about being proficient from the start, but those who are mature enough to do the work and face their failings as steps on the way to success come out stronger in the end.

My lectures serve as critical up-to-date guide posts presenting key fundamental information. My classes tend to have a spread out workload with the grading distributed broadly across different types of assignments and not just based on exams. Most of my classes require group work (debates, group presentations, lab partners, Wikipedia writing groups). I make a point to always offer instruction and advice on group working with close monitoring to help students learn group working to prepare them up for future leadership and management positions. Working groups are always carefully and deliberately constructed to maximize diversity to encourage understanding across diverse gender, race, and socio-economic class.

I am always on the students’ side even though they sometimes don’t appreciate it. My goal is to help students succeed in the long run and that means being honest and helping them through their short term failures. I work very hard to shift student focus away from doing the minimum for this semester’s grade, to focusing on learning what they need to become successful after graduation.