My Teaching Philosophy

Chemical education at the university level presents a unique opportunity to meld many diverse elements of fact, logic, and invention into a tangible understanding of how the world works. It is both theoretical and practical, both microscopic and macroscopic. It can provide students with a holistic view of science, and a framework of problem solving that they can carry through nearly any endeavor. The study of chemistry connects with all the natural sciences, and does so with a comprehensible vision.

My relationship with chemistry started early. My father is a chemist. My interactions with him and the information that I could gather gave me an unusual outlook on the concepts that I encountered. I loved studying science. I loved talking about chemistry. And I planned to teach long before I got to college.

As early as at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, my undergraduate school, I found that I greatly enjoyed teaching. I had opportunities for both classroom and single student environments. Being in front of the class describing something really unusual and interesting to the students seemed just about the most enjoyable thing I had done in my education. My desire to teach was reinforced by my experiences as a teaching assistant in General Chemistry at Purdue. The more formal environment taught me more about the process of teaching well, and of my students’ learning modes. I first taught a select group of chemistry and chemical engineering freshmen in an advanced general chemistry class of 85 students. The majors seemed to devour new concepts, and their problem solving abilities made absorbing new approaches easy for them. I followed those classes with a mainstream General Chemistry course with 1500 students per section. These students needed more repetition, more analogies, and more time. Every new concept was a battle, but one that most of them won in the end. I enjoyed watching and helping both groups learn, as each new insight rolled across their faces. It was a marvelous experience, filled with wonderful mentors and some truly amazing students.

Graduating with my Ph.D., I realized that I had a strong understanding of academic research and good laboratory skills, but little experience in the ‘real world’ of industry. From my father’s experiences, I knew that this environment was significantly different than the one that I was leaving. If I planned to advise and educate students in science, I needed to broaden my own experience.

So, I embarked on an industrial career. The goal was to spend about five years learning about industrial chemistry. While that career lasted longer than I had originally planned, I have had an extremely wide variety of opportunities and successes. I worked in specialty chemicals, in the minerals and mining industry, in pharmaceuticals, and in a small, high-tech start-up company. My responsibilities have taken me from analytical chemistry to organic synthesis, polymer chemistry, materials science, environmental remediation, and chemical engineering. I have worked at the bench, and I have managed large groups.

And, finally, in the last few years, I found myself ready to teach. The commitment to teaching had never actually faded. Throughout my industrial career, I always found my thoughts of the future prefaced with, “And when I am teaching, I’ll…” And so, this year, I accepted a visiting Assistant Professor position at Mankato State. Every day, I am continually reminded just how much I do, in fact, enjoy teaching. But what I have found is that my experience in that industrial world has given me a much more global view. It has allowed me to present to the students, not just what the textbooks tell us about the way things work, but how the science of chemistry is really practiced. And that experience is woven through the concepts that I bring to the teaching of chemistry. I would like to discuss a few of those areas here.

Curriculum: Probably the most striking thing about my transition from academic life to the industrial world was how differently chemistry was practiced there. The first thing that I noticed was that there was no right answer to check at the end of the experiment. I was generating original data. In the academic world, there is almost always a crib, or the data from a previous grad student, or someone else’s paper waiting to inform as to one’s performance. There were no such data here. In fact, even on the most accurate and precise analyses, the real test seemed to be self-consistency.

In industry there was also an emphasis on productivity and return on investment (in research, the investment is one of time). Projects actually ended because their cost limits had been exceeded, so there wasn’t time to fully unravel every aspect of a newly discovered phenomenon. Creativity with existing technology was a prized commodity, more so than the purchase of the latest expensive, advanced technologies. And, perhaps most importantly, it became clear that knowing that a new method actually gave the right answer was paramount to making a new assay succeed. Not only because the method needed to be right, but so that the people who would implement the method would trust it enough to use it. I found that while I certainly understood the statistics that I had been taught to test my results, the concept of validation was not something that I had been taught. I, instead, learned this on the job.

I still see many students leaving undergraduate and graduate programs with the same deficiencies that I had. I believe that we need to provide students with a much more complete view of what it means to create, perform, and invent in chemistry. And this starts in the classroom. Just considering analytical chemistry curricula, it is no longer sufficient to provide students with the formulas for standard deviation, t-tests, f-tests, and linear regression and then consider the topic of data reduction complete. The concept of validation needs to be introduced with the question of, “How do you know that your new method is really right?” And then it needs to be taught in its entirety. Issues of calibration and sources of standards, along with their relative merits and deficiencies, need to be taught along side the techniques themselves. Discerning which information one might have is relevant, and which is not is a crucial skill. And discussion of costs, both monetary and in time, are necessary to understand why a given technique might be chosen over another for the same analysis. Students need to approach and apply this knowledge through problem-based learning. I have always found real-life problems to be the most interesting ones to solve. These problems are a strong approach to gaining insight into chemistry, how it is applied, and how the numbers we generate fit into everyday life.

Laboratory: I am a gadget boy. I make no bones about it. The toys of the analytical chemist are part of the passion that I have for chemistry. I understand instrumentation and how it works. I have a good deal of experience introducing new technologies in labs that have no background in how to utilize those tools. But establishing a laboratory program in an academic environment is much more than that. Implementing a laboratory, especially in analytical chemistry is a challenging prospect. Most modern instrumentation is expensive to buy and expensive to run. Getting the best educational experience out of that equipment is the ultimate goal of a laboratory curriculum.

I believe putting together a coherent and useful laboratory class is more than just, using an analytical lab as an example, doing a lab in each of the major areas of analysis and writing some reports. That is the way we learned the field, but it isn’t sufficient anymore. The modern lab needs to be much more problem based. The truth is that, today, we rarely see a single measurement, or even a single technique used to analyze a sample set. In most situations, any number we generate is only viewed as to how it fits with all the other data we have. Students need to be able to see and analyze for the connectivity in data. I believe that the most effective labs, in this sense, are the ones where the information is linked, built upon, to arrive at a larger answer than simply, say, the number of micrograms per milliliter of sodium in a sample. They need to do analyses where there is more than one attribute to measure. They need to see how, on completion of the lab, the data they have generated is self-consistent.

Research: I am committed to the concept that students who are going to make a career in chemistry need to have an understanding of what research means in science. I do not consider this a luxury. It is a necessity to their true understanding of the field they are entering. It is the central experience that transforms the theory and mechanical technique they receive in lecture and laboratory into the complete and interwoven picture of how chemistry works. It is the experience which connects the chemistry they are learning with their life. And that experience should start early. It should be a pervasive part of their educational experience.

My experience in the state-sponsored environmental laboratory at UW-LaCrosse started in freshman year, and it was invaluable in my placing my classroom education in perspective. It gave me a continuing framework in which to parse and interpret the things that I was learning in class. I believe that an active and vigorous research program is good for the department, as well, providing essential visibility outside of the school. It serves the future employers of our students by giving them that larger context in which their knowledge is placed, and by giving them exposure to techniques that are valuable in industry. But mostly, it benefits the students. It does not matter if they are expecting to go on to graduate or medical school, or if they will enter the work force directly. They all need to see how research happens. That it isn’t simply a black box. That it takes time and energy, and, yes, that it sometimes fails. But that it is the only way to really gain truly new knowledge.

Students need to be exposed to research where the answer is not trivial. There should be some serious work involved in solving the problem. They should be encouraged both to solve problems together and to find a niche that is research all their own. In the same way, they need to have the experience of communicating that information outside of the department. Whether that comes in the form of publications in a journal, or presentations at major meetings, the exposure of opening up their work to peer examination is essential. They need peers who have seen the process, and can help the new student get over the humps and bumps of becoming integrated into the project. This requires a funded program with one or more central themes to develop projects of publishable worth.

But the main goal is that real research experiences are available to students who want to pursue chemistry as a career. This is, I believe, an indispensable part of a student’s education in science. It prepares the student for their career ahead, and it cements their understanding of the field in a way that no other activity can provide.

In conclusion, I think that our students deserve to learn in an environment where theory is reinforced with real examples. Examples that help them visualize those concepts in physical forms that they understand. They deserve useful, hands-on laboratories. I believe that they need to see examples of how what we teach fits into the practical expediency of areas outside of academe. They need to understand the relationship between science, and its practice, and society. I see this understanding, this sense of responsibility as essential to what we are expecting them to learn. Our students deserve an academic experience that prepares them for the career goals that they choose, no matter where those lie. I believe my experiences have provided me with the tools that I need to deliver those learning opportunities to our students.