Statement of Teaching Philosophy, and My Experience Teaching Chemistry in India

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

“A teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame. The teacher who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge but merely repeats his lesson to his students, can only load their minds, he cannot quicken them.” … Rabindranath Tagore (Nobel prize in literature in 1913)

This is my favorite quotation because it express what, I think, is the essence of teaching and learning. As a student, I have observed that the best teachers were those who cared the most about teaching. It is noteworthy to mention that, I loved the way of my organic chemistry teacher taught conformational chemistry by using models. Therefore, a teacher has to create a way to teach the fundamental concepts and facts of the subject. Nevertheless, the amount of time that a teacher puts into preparation directly translates to how the students learn. Besides lecturing, a teacher must be able to recognize how students learn at the group and personal level, and let their lesson plans metamorphose as they interact with students. In fact, the goal of a teacher is to communicate new information to students, not just memorizing details, but also to learn how to think. In my experience, effective learning of students not only consists of lecturing, but also real-life applications, demonstrations, discussion, worksheets, group exercises, and student presentations.

Goal of teaching

My goal as a teacher is not only effectively communicate the fundamental concepts and facts of chemistry, but also the excitement and rewards of making original discoveries in this most fundamental and ubiquitous experimental s...

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...uate students for their research during my post-doctoral period.

Teaching interests

Since my formal training is in main group and transition metal inorganic and organometallic chemistry, I am confident that I could successfully teach the following courses.

• All general chemistry class (chemistry for non-science majors, chemistry for science majors, honor’s general chemistry.

• Inorganic chemistry –I (An introductory survey of the bonding, structure, and reactions of important metal and nonmetal compounds.)

• Inorganic chemistry–II (Structure and mechanism in inorganic and organometallic chemistry, bonding, group theory, basic solid-state chemistry, and spectroscopic techniques.

• Organometallics

• Main-group chemistry

• Bioinorganic chemistry

• Inorganic chemistry laboratories

• Molecular spectroscopy

• Undergraduate as well as graduate research.