Personal Philosophy of Teaching
I consider teaching and research as complementary aspects of scientific life. Each step in teaching possesses the significance of being real work with real people. It gives us a unique chance to share our vision of the world with others. I am not only teaching but I am getting a large feedback from my students. Their fresh opinion related to either particular scientific concept or the modern science problem helps me a lot in enhancing my teaching style and even in my research. Consequently I appreciate any opportunity to work with undergraduate student and often use my classes to recruit additional members to my research group. In the past two years I have supervised the Honor Thesis work of Scott Knowles and the research of Tulane sophomore Siddard Thakhur, with whom we have even published joint paper about DNA single strand dynamics. I hope that the work of Scott Knowles will also lead to a publication devoted to the exciton coupling between DNA base pairs.
Based on my teaching experience at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (1990-1996) and here at Tulane (2003-2006) I am sure that I would be able to teach almost any graduate or undergraduate chemistry classes. For both undergraduate and graduate teaching I would be most efficient in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics or kinetics related classes, which is close to my research experience and interests.
Teaching Responsibilities
My teaching responsibilities here in Tulane have included one class per semester (3 contact hours per week) and office hours (2-3 hours per week) depending on the number of students in class. This is the very reasonable teaching load which leaves plenty of time for the research work. In addition to that students can always stop by my office and ask questions anytime during a week. Also I usually give midterm exams (2 or 3), 5-6 quizzes for classes where freshman or sophomore students dominate and the final exam. The review sessions are given before each exam. Also I am always giving the homework for each lecture mostly made of 2-3 extra-credit problems and 1 mandatory problem. This is important for me because I can see how the students understand material. Also the extracredit opportunity stimulates many of them to work harder. The homework grading takes from 1 to 2 hours per week depending on the class.
Teaching Methods and Strategies
Efficient teaching is very hard and requires real effort. On my opinion the main aims of teacher of science and engineering classes are to give students qualitative understanding of the material and some ability to resolve the related problems of fundamental and practical value. My methods to attain these aims are standard and include the combination of lectures, homeworks and take home tests, office hours and review sessions to bring students the basic knowledge of material and the problem solving skills and to keep them actively involved into the study during the semester.
Some specific strategies used to realize these methods successfully are described below. Lectures are the most important part of the class and I attempt to bring students a maximum knowledge during lecture hours. This requires keeping them actively involved into a learning process during the whole hour of lecture. Unfortunately, many students lack the necessary background in math and other prerequisite classes and the teacher should take care of that problem. I attempt to resolve this problem by preparing lecture notes.
