Daniel Seaton
Teaching Philosophy Statement
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Georgia
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein
My career in physics was set after my first year of instruction. My instructor not only motivated me through excellent teaching, he also opened my eyes to how a well prepared, and designed, class can affect students. I truly believe that his instruction affected my career choice just as much as the subject itself. With that in mind, my teaching style initially relied on much of what I learned during this experience. However, I find that I have had to develop my own style, especially since the majority of my students have been non-majors who aren’t necessarily motivated. My goal as a teacher has been to motivate as many students as possible using various teaching techniques.
Motivating students can be a very challenging subject. Unless you are teaching at a university with a large engineering program, the majority of your students will be taking physics simply to satisfy their degree requirements. Therefore, extra preparation is needed to keep these students motivated in the subject matter. I do my best to include real world examples and applications of current topics in order to keep my students interested. For example, during a magnetic fields lab where a large portion of the class was made up of students interested in attending medical school, I spend extra time relating the experiment to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is now a ubiquitous medical service. Making this connection to such an advanced topic may be a large leap from the current material, but the students really benefit in knowing that what their learning is leading them in an important direction. Along these same lines, a physics instructor often finds that there are large periods of time when students are being trained more in basic mathematics and problem solving skills, where there may be no direct applications. I feel that during these times an instructor must take extra care in reminding students how these skills will be applied in the future.
Research in the field of physics is often filled with open-ended questions that take years to fully understand, followed by years of engineering to truly put the knowledge to work. In the classroom, the subject tends to be more one-dimensional, where assignments only show students small parts of a very broad subject. In most cases students are asked questions which have definite solutions, usually numeric in nature. These types of exercises are extremely important in developing a student’s problem solving and analysis skills, but they may not truly assess a student’s knowledge of the material. They also may encourage more recipe-based learning, where a student’s only concern is memorizing the formula and the basic way to solve the problem. I find it is very important to require students to answer questions in a scientific writing format, which means giving clear, concise answers which are backed by scientific equations and relations. These kinds of exercises offer important feedback regarding a students understanding, while also helping them improve their question answering skills.
My overall goal as a teacher is to create students that appreciate physics, and also have the experience to apply it in their lives. In the end, I hope that I can create situations much like my first experience with this subject.