Teaching Statement

I view my teaching as the most socially valuable aspect of my job as a philosopher. In

contrast to academic research, in which one can never be certain which intellectual efforts will yield fruit, I have always found my teaching to have an immediate and tangible value. This value was evident in the clear improvement in the papers of most of my students over the course of each semester as well as the nice notes that I have received from students after the semester ended. In the following, I provide an overview of my teaching goals and of the methods I have used to pursue them.

One of my main goals in every class I teach is to help my students become better writers. While many of my students will never take a philosophy class again, they will all benefit from being able to present their ideas clearly in writing. To this end, I make sure to have high – but clearly expressed – standards for the assignments and to give the students a significant amount of my time before the papers are due. I often spend the week before a paper is due reading student drafts. Additionally, I always give students typed comments throughout a paper and usually a long comment at the end (which can be anywhere between a paragraph and a page).

Over the course of my teaching career, I have become better at conveying to students precisely what I look for on papers and have seen their papers improve greatly over the course of each semester. In all the classes I have taught the later papers were significantly better on average than the earlier ones. I believe that in order to improve a student’s writing, it is important to give him or her opportunities to do paper revisions. While I always give extensive comments, it is hard for students to truly benefit from them unless they are asked to try to rewrite the paper to address those comments. In smaller classes it is possible to require drafts. When I have had 80 students, I have not required drafts out of sympathy for the teaching assistant. Even for larger classes, however, I have found simple ways to get students to do revisions. For example, I recently started offering extra credit to students willing to cut down the word count of one of their papers by 25%. In doing so, students are forced to really think about which parts of their arguments are necessary and to see where they are using unnecessary words or phrases.

Early on in my teaching career, I discovered that a common reason students do not speak in class is that they find the material foreign and do not know how to formulate their questions about the material. To address this issue, I have constantly sought ways to relate the material to topics with which the students are familiar. For example, in discussing the ethics of business negotiations in which there is a power imbalance, I was initially unable to get a discussion going. In contrast, when I asked them questions about what, in general, makes a relationship abusive, almost everyone had something to say. Once we established some guidelines for what makes a romantic relationship ethically problematic, it was easy to segue into a discussion of what issues can make relationships in general unjust.

In teaching logic, I needed to develop different ways of making the material accessible and less intimidating. While most logic textbooks explain the material by presenting analogies between logic and mathematics, I found that such analogies did not tend to make students feel more comfortable and therefore avoided them. So instead of explaining the logical form of arguments by saying that the sentences were like algebraic equations, I instead compared argument forms to Mad Libs stories in which you can fill the blanks with whatever words you want. To make students more comfortable with proofs, I showed them how one could use the proof method to solve a Sudoku puzzle. To distinguish between syntactic and semantic methods for proving validity, I described two different methods for determining whether a maze is solvable and went through the benefits of each. In addition to these analogies, I made sure to emphasize the applicability of logic beyond the course. For example, I occasionally present an argument from a recent New York Times op-ed or blog and ask students to present the argument in premise-conclusion form. While students always find this exercise challenging and I never ask them to do it on a test or homework, the exercise is successful at showing how logic can help one’s ability to read critically. Finally, in presenting examples in class, I always sought to present interesting examples from current events or pop culture.

I am a big believer in soliciting extensive student feedback. About two years ago I began developing my own mid-semester instructor evaluation forms. These have allowed me to greatly improve my teaching. Because I solicited feedback while there was still time to improve the course, students were much more willing to suggest specific ways of improving the course. These comments enabled me to significantly improve the readability of my slides and also to eliminate various vocal pauses that I did not realize I had. Moreover, by designing my own forms (rather than relying on the university ones) I was able to ask very precise questions about which readings and discussions the students enjoyed. I was surprised by some of the disparities between my perceptions of how successful a class was and student perceptions regarding that class. I remember a particular case where I was considering abandoning an exercise that only triggered a limited discussion. I was surprised to learn that many of the students considered the exercise to be their favorite one.

While each course I have taught or TAed has presented unique challenges and opportunities, the combination of clear expectations, extensive comments on papers, and soliciting student feedback has served me well in every course I have taught. Additionally, I try to make my courses enjoyable. Often, small differences in presentation greatly impact whether students will absorb the material. I discovered, for example, that I could get students to understand an explanatory regress by presenting it as an iPhone text conversation between a person proposing explanations and another person asking questions about the proposals. From my experience, students greatly appreciate attempts to make the material accessible. By investing time in my slides I am able to significantly increase their enjoyment of the course. At the same time, I teach the material at an extremely high level. There is no reason why a class cannot be both rigorous and enjoyable. When students are invested in a course’s subject, they are much more willing to rise up and meet its demands.