Peter Young –Teaching Statement 2003-04
Professor in Physics

It is a great honor to be nominated for a 2003-2004 Excellence in Teaching award. Here are some thoughts on how I try to make Physics classes a stimulating and rewarding experience for students.

I would like to start with some remarks about teaching in the Physics department. Most physics faculty are able to teach most of the courses, so each of us covers a broad range of subjects. We also teach the full spectrum of levels from lower division introductory physics, through upper division classes for majors, to advanced graduate classes. Recently, I have been assigned to teach mainly at the upper division level, but I have also frequently taught graduate classes and have also taught lower division classes. In the "core" classes, there is a specified set of topics which must be covered, but in the undergraduate electives and advanced graduate classes there is a lot of flexibility, so faculty have the opportunity to develop new courses. In my case, I developed an essentially new course on Computational Physics which I shall discuss at the end.

I try very hard to incorporate into my teaching the following characteristics: enthusiasm, clarity, organization, and correct emphasis, since I believe they are essential.

Enthusiasm

The description of how nature works by the laws of physics is, in my opinion, a wonderful and beautiful accomplishment. So many phenomena can be explained in terms of a few basic principles, and many behaviors which might seem unrelated are, in fact, explained by the same law. An example I like to give, due to Newton, is that the law which describes how apples fall from trees is the same as that which describes how the moon goes round the earth, and the earth and the other planets round the sun. It is important for physics instructors to convey their enthusiasm for this overall picture to help sustain the students during the long, difficult road they must travel in order to understand it.

For students to work to their full potential they themselves need to be enthusiastic about the subject. This enthusiasm is hard to sustain if the instructor seems bored and simply regurgitates material from the previous year.  By contrast, a student who is thinking of quitting physics may change his/her mind on account of a good class from an enthusiastic instructor.

In this context I should mention that there is an element of "performance" in teaching. My own personality is rather shy and reserved, and not given to effusive displays of emotion. However, in class these reservations have to be overcome in order to clearly convey my enthusiasm for physics. Of course the enthusiasm itself is real; it's just the outgoing display of it which is different from my normal personality.

Clarity

It is very important to thoroughly prepare a lecture in order to explain each part of it in the clearest and simplest manner. When I prepare notes I don't write them down in meticulous detail but I do write down and outline and think through carefully in my head just how I will explain each topic. This mental exercise is then repeated before giving the lecture. I'm not able to lecture without notes because I would sometimes forget the best way to present a topic, and might even put topics in the wrong order. On the other hand, I also do not read my notes word for word, since this can lead to a dry delivery.  The notes are usually put down on the table in front of me, and I only look at them from time to time in order to know what to do next and to have my memory jogged as to how to explain it.

Organization

In addition to each individual topic being presented very clearly, I also like to make clear to the class the logical organization of the different topics.  It is therefore very important that I know exactly where I am going with the material in the lecture, and also how it connects with material covered earlier and later. In this way, I can convey to the students the relationships between the different parts of the course. This gives them a better overall understanding of the subject, and also puts the essential aspects more securely into their memory for reuse in a future course. This is important because physics instructors frequently find it necessary to review material that students have met before (and sometimes met more than once).  I truly believe that seeing connections between things helps you to remember them as well as to understand them better.

Correct emphasis

A difficulty with teaching physics is that students are required to understand a lot of rather complicated material. It is therefore easy for students to be overwhelmed by all the technical details and lose track of the important points. I therefore repeatedly emphasize to students what are the main results in each of the topics that we study. If we have to go through a fairly complicated derivation of some result, I will make clear at the start what we are aiming to prove, remind students on the way where we are going, and, when we get to the end, make clear that this is the desired result. I also remind students of the significance of the result we have just obtained, so they can put it in context.  In my view, lack of appropriate emphasis is the single greatest failing of many instructors (and also of many scientific research papers and seminars).

Of course, in practice, there are many ways of teaching compatible with these four key aspects. For example, some instructors like to present their material on a computer using PowerPoint. This has the advantage that the presentation is very neat. On the other hand, I myself prefer to use the blackboard. The reason is that with presentations prepared in advance, there is a great temptation to go too fast for the students to be able to follow. By contrast, writing the material on the board forces me to go at a steady pace which, I hope, gives the students time to assimilate the material.  Of course, the choice of presentation, computer or blackboard, is a matter for personal preference of the instructor; either can be used successfully.

The courses I give are challenging, and I make clear to the students that I expect them to work hard. It is easier to get the students to respond to this if they realize that you, the instructor, are also willing to put in extra effort. One way I do this is through the preparation needed to make the lectures as clear as possible.  Another is that, in addition to office hours, students can come to my office at any time, and, as long as I'm not currently seeing someone else or frantically trying to meet a deadline, I will be happy to talk to them.  In addition, when I find that students have not had enough preparation in some subject that they should have covered before, I give an extra makeup lecture to cover this material. I also frequently provide handouts on material which is not covered by the book or covered poorly. While the first draft of a handout is usually done fairly quickly, I need to spend considerable extra time to make the discussion as clear and simple as possible and also structured in the most logical manner.  Feedback from the students indicates that they appreciate the care with which the handouts are prepared.  Finally, it is important for the students to feel that you have respect for them. I remember that, as a student, I frequently had to struggle to understand physics, and so I appreciate that it is also not easy for the students in my class.

The problem that students can miss basic concepts and get lost in a maize of details is particularly acute in lower division classes. To remedy this, when teaching lower division classes I adopt the approach advocated by Eric Mazur in his excellent book "Peer Instruction: A User's Manual" in which the key feature is the "concept test". Rather than going through all the details in the textbook, the instructor requires the students to read the appropriate section of the book in advance of the lecture, so he/she only needs to cover the important topics in it.  At least once during each lecture, the instructor sets a concept test in which there is one or more multiple-choice question (which I put on an overhead transparency) that does not require a detailed calculation to answer it, but only an understanding of the concept just discussed. After giving the students time to think, I take votes on which answer is correct. If a big majority gets it right then I proceed on with the lecture. If not, I ask the students to discuss it among themselves to see if they can get it right a second time, and also explain the concept again.  This approach has two huge advantages. One is that the lecture is spent on the basic concepts, not the details which students can get from the book and also from discussion sections.  Secondly there is active student participation which makes the lecture more interesting and varied.

An instructor should always be trying to improve his/her teaching skills. One aspect that I'm currently debating is whether to use concept tests not only in lower division classes but also in upper division and possibly also in graduate classes. In these classes, I do currently involve the students by posing questions from time to time to check whether they are following the material and to keep them awake.  What I don't do at present, but may do in the future, is emphasize concept testing more by providing multiple-choice questions, taking a vote, and allowing students to discuss the problem among themselves.

I would also like to mention that I have developed what is essentially a new course on Computational Physics. Using a computer to get a numerical solution of a problem is more and more important in science. We have therefore had an undergraduate elective course in Computational Physics for some time. What I did was to completely revamp it, in a way discussed below, and also offer it at the graduate level as well as at the undergraduate level. Without going into technical details the main change was that, in addition to devoting the first part of the course to teaching the students how to write efficient computer programs to solve important problems, I introduced a new second part in which students use a sophisticated mathematical package (Mathematica) to solve more complicated problems, for which it would be difficult for them to write their own programs in the time available. Mathematica also makes it straightforward to display results as graphs, which are often more instructive than formulae or tables of numbers. There was no book which covered these two aspects in the way that I liked, so I prepared virtually all the material from scratch and put it on my web site: "http://bartok.ucsc.edu/peter/115". Incidentally, for all my classes I put handouts, homework assignments, and, recently at least, homework solutions on my web site.

There are others things I could say about teaching, but I will practice what I preach and limit myself to the most important points.  I therefore stop here and thank you for your consideration.