My teaching statement
I wrote this essay ten years ago, when I was applying for faculty positions. It got me the job. It still keeps me going.
Looking back on the classes I have taken, even my favorite ones, I am saddened by how little of them I remember. Most of the facts are gone. The only reproducible knowledge is an anecdote or two, several trivia, and an assurance that I know where to look when I need to revisit that material. However, what sets apart the best taught classes is that I came away from them with more than mere reproducible facts. Those classes helped me internalize a way of thinking that proves useful long after the course facts have evaporated. This holds equally true for the great engineering as well as for the great humanities classes. The thinking and problem-solving skills acquired in one field or problem area can be applied to many others as long as the teacher makes sure to emphasize the portability and universality of the foundations of human knowledge.
During my studies at Stanford University, I taught ten different courses ranging from introductory programming to graduate courses on communication and optimization. The class size varied from ten to a hundred, the classroom moved from California to Japan and back, my roles changed from teaching assistant through TA coordinator to instructor. Yet I stuck to some core beliefs and principles that have made me a better teacher and guided me to the Stanford Centennial Teaching Assistant Award in 2008.
The roots of my teaching philosophy reach back to my first TA training session, when the coordinator said that I should prepare for a lecture as if my IQ will drop by half the moment I face the classroom. This sentence made such an impact, that two years later, when I inherited his job, it was the first thing I told the new TAs. It keeps coming back to haunt me every time my vanity or my laziness get the best of me. In the years since, I have learned that the only way to make up for this apparent IQ drop is to know exactly what to say and how to present the first five minutes in front of an audience. Dry runs are only a part of it. The larger part is putting the presentation in context, and framing the beginning in a way that makes the remaining 40-odd minutes less of a chore, and more of a chorus, rephrasing and repeating the take-home point as often as possible.
Every time I get a chance to teach, I ask myself what is the single thing I want my audience to remember at the end of the day. Then I try to summarize it in one paragraph or catch phrase, so that they hold on to it while thousands of other words drift by. The more universal the summary, the more applicable it will be to everybody present. The more striking the words or images in it, the more likely it is that they will get stuck in memory an hour later. The more connections I make to the summary during the course of the lecture, the easier it is to see the importance of the concept and its place in the vast body of science.
Once the goal of the lecture is clear, I try to engage the audience with questions, some with a clear answer that could be shouted from the back row (not that people in the back row ever shout answers), some so open-ended that even I do not know the answer. I spend most of my preparation for lecture coming up with those questions, and finding ways to field them as if they are a natural extension of the lecture. By varying the type of questions, I strive to appeal to different personalities in the audience, yielding my soapbox to those that have no trouble responding in public, but also teasing those who will never bother to raise their hand. While this type of lecturing is not guaranteed to be interactive, the goal is not to get everybody talking as much as to get everybody thinking. Using some of those same questions in assignments further drives the points home, and makes problem sets and exams an effective teaching and thinking tool.
I have been fortunate to learn from some amazing teachers, who incorporate many of the tactics outlined above. Without exception, the best teachers have also been the clearest about their expectations from the students. Grading is never perfectly objective, yet publishing clear grading criteria and creating unambiguous assignments is the best way to prevent headaches after the grades are in. This only proves the importance of thinking about the right question to ask, be it during lecture or during the evaluation process.1
Yet all the approaches mentioned above are worth nothing without an appropriate attitude. While I do not believe that teachers should be friends with their students, a certain level of familiarity will help the students identify with the instructor and the subject matter. There are several ways of establishing such a relationship, ranging from learning students’ names early, to asking for feedback or adjusting the office hours to accommodate the students’ schedule. I have spent numerous hours mentoring students and training teaching assistants, both as a teacher and as the Stanford Electrical Engineering graduate student advisor, and I know that the biggest life lessons do not come from getting the right answers on a problem set, but from understanding the principles of problem solving.
The first president of Stanford University, an ichthyologist named David Starr Jordan, said that every time he learned a student’s name, he forgot the name of another fish. I have learned many students’ names, and as a consequence I have forgotten many things I was taught throughout the years. Yet, some truths keep swimming around in my memory, refusing to be forgotten and resurfacing in most unexpected times and places. Whenever they brush against my consciousness, I reflect back on who put them there, and my appreciation of that person increases. I would be happiest if ten years from now I run into a former student of mine, and I instantly recall their name while they fish out a nugget of wisdom I planted in them. That alone would be worth a lifetime of teaching.
