Courses Taught:
Teaching Statement:
"The true teachers are those who help us think for ourselves." - Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
The words of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan summarizes my teaching principles. The responsibility of the teacher does not end in imparting the knowledge but to increase the curiosity or interest in the students. Thus, I believe in interactive classrooms with open discussions where not only the students learn about the fundamentals but also the tutor gains different perspectives which opens up various new avenues of research and learning.
Classroom Teaching
I have been fortunate to get the opportunity to teach two different sophomore level classes (Data Structures and Algorithms and Discrete Structures for Computing) as a primary instructor. My responsibilities included designing the course, teaching, managing graders and teaching assistants, occasional grading and holding office hours. I have also been a Teaching Assistants to seminar classes where the responsibilities include grading and scheduling seminars.
Communication is key to my teaching strategy. As I have learned through my experiences as a primary instructor, interactions and discussions with students helps in better and faster understanding of the core concepts in the subject, monitoring progress and real-time feedback. In order to incorporate interactions in the classrooms, I would design the course structure to include in-class exercises, group discussions and presentations. However, in larger classes (for example, class size of 100 in Discrete Structures for Computing) provided the lecture time it becomes difficult to interact with every student individually. Also with personal devices such as laptops and phones, the attention span of the students vary which shifts their objective for the course from learning the material to achieving a passing grade. In such situations, these group discussions and collaborative activities develop their ability to work in a team and peer evaluate which are some of the key skills required in both academia and industry. For example, to explain sorting algorithms in Data Structures and Algorithms I asked volunteers from the students and demonstrated the working of the algorithm by sorting them by their height. As most of the lectures are limited classroom time, I would encourage the students to utilize the office hours and also include online discussion tools to allow the students to post questions beyond the class hours.
In order to maintain the interests of the students, I would include real world problems and related applications in the lectures such that students can evaluate the importance and impact of the courses while they are taking the courses. These would include interview problems, current industry application and application to concepts in other subjects that the students relate to and get an in depth understanding of the materials (its implications and standard usage). I believe that knowledge cannot be bound by a syllabus or a course structure. Courses are mere sparks that ignites the curiosity of the students in a particular area and makes them capable of self-learning, analyzing and conducting independent research in the same or similar domain. Also, I would like my students to gain sufficient expertise in the subject that improves their general understanding, problem solving skills which would help them in pursuing their career objectives. In the both courses where I was instructor, we monitor the progress of the students not only through classical assessment methods such as tests and homework but our assignment structure includes a culture assignment which is intended to broaden the awareness of the student in Computer Science. The culture assignments include studying a famous scientist in the field, attending and submitting a report on a seminar and critically analyzing a recent or ground breaking literature. In future, I would like to incorporate similar culture assignments to increase domain awareness among the students. This is important for the students to be aware of the ongoing developments and the professionals in the field.
Teaching is a two way learning experience for me. The instructors learns about how to adapt various teaching methodologies based on the dynamics of the students. Thus student feed-back is one of the most important feature for a course design. I would include pre, mid and post evaluation feedback for the students such that I can adapt the course structure and my teaching style based on their requirements and understanding.
Mentoring Experience
During my graduate studies at Texas A&M, I have mentored several undergraduate students either as a part of summer research program or university undergraduate research program. My responsibilities included advising, monitoring progress and designing initial preparatory materials. At end of each program, the students were able to conduct research and present their research results formally (poster presentations and research report).
As a graduate student mentor, I learned the most important thing is to inspire the students to be able to conduct research. Frequent monitoring and advising helps in engaging the students and keep them interested in the research area beyond the end of the program but also provide a way of self assessment that helps them find a research area more aligned to their interest. Research might seem overwhelming to beginner undergraduate students especially understanding the technical terms which they are unfamiliar with. To ease their understanding, I generally provided overview lectures at the beginning of the program. I also encouraged them to pen down their thoughts and understanding. This not only helped me assess their understanding and interests but also helped them to improve their skills in technical writing.
To summarize, my teaching philosophy includes interactive discussion based learning that helps student in easy understanding of the subject and encourages teamwork. I can teach any undergraduate, any core graduate level and any specialty class in my area of expertise (computational geometry, robotics and algorithms).