I was awarded the competitive teaching fellowship from Johns Hopkins University Dean's Office. The Dean’s Teaching Fellowship (DTF) allows PhD candidates to propose, design, and instruct their own course of interest. The course I proposed to teach was a unifying theme for Earth Sciences: Natural Hazards.
We are all the residents of the Earth. I believe it is crucial to know how we impact it and how it impacts us! In this course, I taught students about the Earth processes, and how and when they become hazardous. In the course, we covered a variety of topics e.g. epidemiology, tropical storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and landslides. We discussed disaster case studies to explore the scientific principles behind their occurrence and the role of human decision-making in turning a hazard into a disaster.
Fall semester 2020 was a unique time to teach a course on natural hazards, in the sense that all students were directly impacted by at least one type of disaster, the global pandemic. In addition, the semester coincided with a record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season on the US east coast. According to NOAA , in September alone, 10 named storms were formed. The west coast was also struggling with California fire. What a time to be teaching on natural hazards! See the photos of the hurricane Laura and the fires from space.
The first slide of first class session
I taught two sessions of this course as a guest lecturer. In one of the sessions I taught about Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, derivations of Earth's rotation, geostrophic motion, and Taylor-Proudman Theorem. In the other session, I taught students about fluid kinematics, Lagrangian versus Eulerian reference frame, the concepts of streamline, pathline, streakline, and timeline.
For this course, I lectured on topics such as deformation of fluid elements, and derivation of shear stresses and equation of fluid motion.
There is a lot going into teaching a course properly. To learn how to teach, I completed three phases of teaching training offered by Center for Educational Resources at Johns Hopkins University.
