My desire to teach astronomy and physics comes from the same drive that led me to want to study it as a student myself in the first place: a sense of wonder, curiosity, and inspiration. It is my hope to instill these same feelings in my students. Physics and astronomy have the ability to tap into our innate desire to understand the world and the universe around us, and as a teacher of these subjects I can use that interest and curiosity to guide students to learn about science, critical thinking, problem solving, and a love of learning itself. The skills I want my students to learn go far beyond rote memorization and the regurgitation of facts for an exam. I want students to understand not just what science tells us, but how we know what we know. I want them to appreciate the scientific method and learn to question what they are told and come to know and believe things for themselves, not just because someone said it, even if that someone is me. I want students to grapple with challenges, employ problem solving, and create mental models that require them to put pieces together to create a big picture understanding. What bigger picture of understanding could there be than that of the whole universe around us?
I aim to create an environment where students have freedom to learn, and seek to promote inclusivity where all students can feel like they belong. I want students to feel like they are supported and encouraged and feel that I am on their side when it comes to the success of their learning. I can work to establish such an environment by constantly working to make science feel approachable and understandable and combatting the ideas and tendencies toward elitism and gatekeeping that can too often be present in science and academia. I also want to carefully craft my use of language and class policies so that they are respectful and encouraging to students and treat students as active participants in their own learning, not just passive vessels to dump information into. As such, I also expect students to take responsibility for their learning. I expect students to actively participate in discussions and activities in class, work through problems in their homework, and be willing to push themselves with challenging material. I want students to develop a growth mindset: belief that their abilities are not set in stone, but constantly developing. I highlight this by impressing that revision and reflection are important steps in learning and will be an important part of their grade.
I believe it is important to have clearly defined learning goals both for a course and for an individual class that then shape the content and activities used to achieve them. I also believe it is useful for students to be aware of what these goals are so that they can focus and direct their own learning experience. Strategies I use in my teaching include lectures broken up by questions for the students to consider. These could be questions that simply check whether the students are understanding and following the content of the class, or can be more advanced and require the students to take the knowledge they have learned and apply it or combine it in some new way to come to the answer. I then have the students discuss their answers with each other to utilize each other’s knowledge to learn, and to have them deepen their own understanding by explaining it to someone else. These discussion exercises serve as an informal way for me to assess the class’s understanding, and for students to assess their own understanding. I feel that having consistent, smaller assessments, such as these in-class discussions, weekly homeworks, and low stakes quizzes or practice quizzes, allow for constant engagement with course material and feedback for both me as the instructor and for the students themselves as to what is going well and what requires more attention in the course. This also can help take the emphasis off large exams or assignments that can serve as single points of failure in a class that create unnecessary anxiety for students that does not benefit their learning.
Undergraduate course, Ginnell College, Physics Department, 2025
A study of analytical mechanics, including Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalisms of particle dynamics, rigid body motion, and harmonic oscillations. Numerical methods laboratory taught in Python.
Undergraduate course, Ginnell College, Physics Department, 2025
Lab will be meeting weekly for approximately three hours. During the lab, you will gain hands-on experience working with the physics concepts covered in lecture. As part of this, you will also become practiced in conducting experiments and interpreting data.
Undergraduate course, Ginnell College, Physics Department, 2025
This course is the first part of a yearlong, calculus-based introductory physics sequence, focusing on the application of physical principles, logical reasoning, and mathematical analysis to understand a broad range of natural phenomena related to force and motion. Topics include Newtonian mechanics, conservation principles, gravity, and oscillation. This course meets for six hours each week and involves both classroom and laboratory work. This course follows the Workshop Physics model. The Workshop approach disposes of the lecture and lab dichotomy of the conventional approach to teaching introductory physics. As such, we will not have formal lectures, and you will use the class meetings for hands-on investigations of topics generally covered in the first semester of college physics.
Undergraduate course, Ginnell College, Physics Department, 2024
This course is the second part of a yearlong, calculus-based introductory physics sequence, focusing on the application of physical principles, logical reasoning, and mathematical analysis to understand a broad range of electromagnetic phenomena. Topics include electricity, magnetism, light, and early atomic theory. This course meets for six hours each week and involves both classroom and laboratory work.
Undergraduate course, Ginnell College, Physics Department, 2024
In this course we will be taking a whirlwind tour of the universe. We will explore our view of the universe from here on earth, and expand to peruse the menu of the types of objects that make up the universe including stars, black holes, galaxies, and more! We will explore how these things form, their unique lifecycles, and their eventual fates. We will also explore the history of the entire universe itself and how it is evolving. Throughout this exploration, we will learn about how it is we know what we know, and how science allows us to answer complex questions that range outside of our everyday experience.
Undergraduate course, University of Colorado Boulder, Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences Department, 2023
In this course we will be taking a whirlwind tour of the universe. We will peruse the menu of the types of objects that make up the universe including stars, black holes, galaxies, and more! We will explore how these things form, their unique lifecycles, and their eventual fates. We will also explore the history of the entire universe itself and how it is evolving. Throughout this exploration, we will learn about how it is we know what we know, and how science allows us to answer complex questions that range outside of our everyday experience.