Teaching

TA Physics 50: Introduction to Observational Astronomy for non-majors (Fall 2015, Fall 2016)

Being a lab TA for this class is great fun, because it takes place at night up at the Stanford Student Observatory! So not only do I get to help non-scientists wrap their head around the crazy thing that is our universe (one of them told me I “made his senior year” by showing him lunar craters through the eyepiece on the 16”), I get to journey through the entire process of observing with them, from target selection and opening (and hand-steering) the dome, to taking and reducing images. It is a process from which we are, for better or for worse, insulated from as observers at the Blanco telescope in Chile, where we take data for the Dark Energy Survey.

TA Physics 43: Electricity and Magnetism for Engineers (Spring 2014)

E+M is my favorite subject, so I really enjoyed leading discussion sections and tutoring students one-on-one during office hours and in the Physics Tutoring Center.

EDUC 285: The Teaching and Learning of Science

This isn’t a class I’ve TA-ed, rather, it’s one I’m currently taking from Prof. Carl Weiman. Each week we read primary and secondary literature on education research, and workshop an assignment for a target class (mine’s Physics 50) that takes inspriation from the research principles we’ve discussed during the week.

As an aside to other grad students out there: You should read one book about teaching, and it should be this one. It condenses a huge amount of research into 26 manageable and alphabetical chunks (which you’ll learn in chapters E and K is an excellent idea). In addition, it’s very open about the limitations of individual studies and educational frameworks–good perspective to have as a practitioner of education.