Teaching and research in chemistry is what I have wanted to do with my life since I was twelve years old (Honest!). Chemistry is an exciting, stimulating mental exercise, as well as being extremely important to our society, and communicating that excitement and importance to students is tremendous fun. I enjoy teaching at all levels, from general chemistry to graduate special topics courses.
In recent years, I have been exploring some of the ways in which computers can be used to supplement the more traditional methods of conveying chemical information. While I will never give up blackboard and chalk, I find that the ability of computers to generate full-color images of molecules, that can be manipulated by the students, can enliven many classes.
I generate web sites for all my classes, making avilable my notes, further hints on problem solving, illustrations of molecular structure, links to relevant literature, and videos to illustrate complex techniques like DNA sequencing. The menu at left provides links to these pages.
Over the years, I have come to believe that examinations get in the way of learning. (This is especially true of the many standaradized tests forced on elementary and secondary school teaching!) Students expend a lot of energy trying to guess what the instructor will ask, memorizing old exams, and otherwise trying to "beat the system". In my advanced classes I don't use exams; instead I prefer problem sets and other exercises, to be worked outside of class, preferably by groups of two or three students, and then discussed in class. Students may be offered the opportunity to rework items with which they had particular difficult after comments from me, before receiving a grade on that work.
I try to encourage active learning, as opposed to reading a text and highlighting. In beginning courses, when I do use a text in the standard way, I urge the students to outline what they read, making note of things they didn't understand, or particular kinds of exercises they had difficulty with. I suggest they then bring those notes to class and add to them from classroom discussion. When students come to my office for help, those notes can aid me in pinpointing their problems. (Incidentally, I maintain an open door policy; students are welcome any time I am in my office, no appointment needed.)
Does all this work? Probably not for every student, but I am proud to receive comments like the following on my evaluations:
An ongoing project, undertaken with prompting from several friends and colleagues, is to make available the set of answers I developed for the problems in Ed Gould's classic text, Mechanism and Structure in Organic Chemistry. The text is long out of print, but the problems are still valuable teaching aids. You can find my progress so far at the link on the left.