Teaching Statement

Lighting the fire with passion

“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled” – Plutarch

My impetus for adopting passionate pedagogy came from my grade 12 physics teacher. In our first class he came in and proved, using physics far beyond the scope of our class, one of the most exciting and counterintuitive facts in physics. He showed us mathematically that if one twin was sent on a decade long expedition traveling near the speed of light, upon return, the corresponding twin on earth would have aged almost 20 years (double the age of the traveling twin). His eyes glistened and voice boomed as he spoke, adopting passion akin to a spiritual leader. Since then I was hooked on physics. Although there was so much about his teaching style that worked well, the most remarkable aspect of it was his excitement about his field of study. Students in his class would often stay into lunch breaks to voluntarily learn more, feeding off of his fervent enthusiasm. The following year, I had a job as a teaching assistant for a math class and tried my best to embody this approach of teaching. Although it was difficult juggling the stress of teaching for the first time and keeping my outwards excitement for the subject, I found that when I treated the particular lesson as an experiential journey instead of a routine lecture, students responded much more positively to the class. I found this to be true despite the difficulty of the material that was being studied, which highlighted how important my emotional delivery was in keeping students engaged. As time goes on, I feel even more so that passionate teaching should not be a luxury only offered by teachers lucky enough to be in the discipline they love, but a skill that can be learned by any teacher in any field. Learning requires effort, and if we, as teachers who decided to pick a subject to teach, do not seem electrified by it, we cannot expect all our students to put in the extra effort to learn fully. It is our responsibility to make sure we find the excitement in whatever subject we have to teach however mundane it may seem to us at the start.

Keeping students within a zone of proximal development

“Comfort zones are most often expanded through discomfort.” - Peter McWilliams

Another way to share the passion of a subject with students is to keep them consistently challenged, while keeping them from falling behind or becoming overwhelmed. As a professor I think this involves spending some time training TA’s on the zone of proximal development and on how to offer support to students in a way that will encourage them to ask the right questions. For example, for a first-year math or physics class, this could involve asking students to share why each step in a proof is done while walking them through it. This allows students to fortify knowledge and eventually use the formulas independently. In addition, if a TA or teacher finds that students are consistently making mistakes with, for example, the rules of exponents, it may be worthwhile to either teach it to them or point to resources that could help. In a course I taught with students that had a particularly wide range of skills coming into the course, I asked students to stay behind for some basic refreshers and also shared “Khan Academy” links with the class so they could pace their own learning when they needed extra support. In addition, I often kept extra handouts with more challenging questions for students that wanted to prepare for harder ‘thinking’ questions, or for the upcoming year. Teaching students to be comfortable with being uncomfortable can help them settle into a zone where they feel challenged without stress.

Teaching Using First Principles

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” – Albert Einstein

Teaching using first principles serves 2 important functions.

1)    The first is that it solidifies concepts in a learner’s mind by embedding it in a web of intersecting ideas in the brain. This allows for more efficient retrieval because students will know how to build it back up from universally accepted facts. In addition, it naturally forces students to have a more comprehensive understanding of the subject, as they can strip the concept back to its fundamental building blocks.

2)    Secondly, it develops critical thinking skills that are so important for students to become lifelong self-learners.

By practicing breaking down material into its first principles students will be able to identify their own cognitive biases and maybe even those of their teachers. This is one of the toughest things to do, because as we become experts in our fields, we become further removed from the underlying facts that built up to our current understanding. Being able to see the bigger picture allows us as teachers to keep a learner’s mindset and help students build a solid scaffolding on which to learn.