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My teaching philosophy is to try to make the students understand that they're just not
going to school and taking a bunch of courses.
I like to ask a little bit more from the students than they think they can give.
I don't believe in letting a student just memorize things. I test to see what they have
learned. Multiple choice and curve do not exist in my vocabulary.
I'm becoming more tuned in to the fact that we have a responsibility to turn out people
who can think critically. What are the skills they will use, what does a liberal arts education
get them, because that is a constant question.
A lot of it is about learning to think critically, learning to write well, or communicate your
thoughts in an organized manner and so I've become more aware of that as I teach, to make
sure that they're getting that.
I like my students, and I worry about them, and I want them to learn the material and
I want to help them. It's not a war between me and my students. I would like them to come
out excited that they took the class, that they learned something, that it was fun, not
just that they learned some material and moved on.
I'm a first generation college student. I know that had I not had good teachers as an
undergrad that I probably wouldn't be here.
The most rewarding is to see the quiet, shy student who, you can see from their writing
or even the look in their eyes that they're really engaged but kind of not wanting to
risk it, and by the end of the semester they're talking and writing excellent papers and looking,
"Maybe I can actually do this, maybe I can be a scholar."
The ability to get into their heads and try to see the world from their viewpoint makes
me a better teacher. It's hard to do. The art of teaching is being able to see things
from the student's perspective, because you forget how far you've come.
The amount of enthusiasm I see in the students is a pretty good indication of how successful
I've been. Another way of measuring success is if they come back to me after a few years
and they say, "hey, I took your class, it was wonderful, I was so well prepared for
medical school, or OT school, or PT school."
These kids -- they're going to fix the problems we messed up, hopefully, and we need to teach
them the skills to be able to solve problems, and that's more than just a multiple choice
test. That's my goal.