Teaching Philosophy
I have to confess that if I were forced to choose between a career involving only teaching and one involving only scientific research, I would chose the latter. But I really enjoy teaching eager students, and I think it is a very important civic responsibility as a scientist. A properly functioning democratic society requires that all its citizens be scientifically literate and capable of thinking critically, and I take the responsibility for helping to instill these ideas very seriously.I also think the most important way to teach and learn experimental sciences is to do it, not to just read about it and take courses. For that reason, my laboratory is often host to several undergraduate students as well as Ph.D. students, and we all learn from each other. The importance of learning by doing in science cannot be over-estimated. A close corollary is that the most important aspect of a lecture and textbook based course is not the lecture or the textbook, but rather learning how to solve problems with pencil and paper. I am not much for testing memorization. My courses emphasize learning how to solve unanticipated problems, not memorizing how to solve familiar ones found only in textbooks.
For those reasons, I demand the very best from my students (and myself). I think my students are spending their (or their parents') hard-earned money for the best education possible, so I try to do my best to give them the best I can produce. I will not pander to and insult my students by making my classes an easy A by diluting them of rigorous content. Because administrators want easily quantifiable measures by which to evaluate their faculty, such as number of papers published, number of committees endured, or popularity scores on student evaluations, there is a tremendous pressure at UCSC to pander. This can be seen from the fact that 79% of the grades given out to students at UCSC are either As or Bs, and only 5% are non-passing (D or F). My grading scheme in lower-division classes tends to be more realistic. A median grade in my introductory chemistry class is a C. Deal with it.
Finally, I try not to introduce politics into the classroom, at least not on the level of the disheveled elbow-patched liberal arts professor. Where I do introduce it, it is done on a much more subversive level. I place a premium upon critical thinking. My exams do not look like income tax forms to be filled out. This is sometimes mistaken for making things hard. I don't try to make things hard. I don't need to. Science is already hard to begin with. I just try to equip my students for scientific intellectual self-defense. If in doing so I create a small army of hyper-critical malcontents, well, I'm not sorry.