My enthusiasm for teaching stems from my love of science and commitment to my students. Students are the most important part of teaching. I want to show the students how excited I am about teaching and excite them about learning. I prepare for lectures and organize and present materials I believe will help students learn more effectively. This is how I show the students my dedication to their education and their success in learning.

Engineering, an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor, draws on knowledge from a variety of scientific fields and mathematics to solve real world problems. Teaching engineering synthesizes a diverse knowledge base and incorporates this information into useful problem solving tools. Engineering students benefit from practice using their newly found skills on real world problems. To help them understand the strengths and limitations of these skills, I try to students how they have developed these tools (where information from prerequisite classes fits with current course material) and what areas of knowledge they can explore with their newly developed skills.

Rarely can complex, real world problems be solved with expertise from one area of knowledge. A teamwork approach to engineering makes writing and other communications skills as vital as mathematics and science. Ineffectual communication isolates an engineer from his/her colleagues, decreasing the individual's effectiveness as an engineer. To encourage strong communication skills, I incorporate writing into homework assignments and laboratory reports to give students practice communicating their ideas to others. Labs and other collaborative projects help students practice oral communications skills and encourage students to develop teaching skills to educate others about their work.

To maximize learning for the greatest number of students, I use multiple teaching approaches. Different teaching techniques address different learning styles. Classroom demonstrations, problem solving sessions, labs, and other projects complement lecture presentation and engage students with different communication styles and varied learning patterns. Only by using multiple approaches can I address the learning styles of a diverse student body.

The internet and web publishing make it easier to provide information to students. I post syllabi, homework sets, homework solutions, lecture notes, and unit summaries to the class web site. Distributing materials this way saves precious class time for discussing course material. Remote information access through the web assists students who may live far from campus or may have severe demands on their time. Using hyperlinks helps organize on-line materials more coherently. Posting homework solutions on-line decreases the delay in responding to students' efforts, and posting old exams "levels the playing field" when it comes time for exams.

As I alluded to above, computers enhance communication between the students and myself. Beside the use of the anonymous question box, I use e-mail to answer direct student questions. This gets the information to the students faster and lets the students ask questions when they have them...what ever time of day or night. E-mail responses also give students a written response to their questions. To assure two way communication on e-mail, I require an e-mail roll call at the beginning of the quarter. This ensures students have established e-mail accounts, can receive class announcements, and have computing resources available to them on campus or elsewhere.

The foundation of a good grading policy is to explicitly explain performance standards on the syllabus. Furthermore, following grading of student work, I post an anonymous selection of the best answers on the class web page. Posting these exceptional samples challenges students to produce similar quality work.

A teacher's role is not limited to teaching but extends to mentoring as well. As a mentor, I am prepared to answer questions related to advising. If I am unable to answer the student's questions, I have at hand the numbers for them to contact people with the needed information. As an instructor, I am open and available to students. While electronic communication is fast and convenient, it cannot replace interpersonal contact in effective communication. Therefore, I maintain an open door policy to maximize my availability to students.