Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment.
–James 3:1

Both of my parents were educators. I learned at a fairly young age the importance of good teachers and grew up with something of an inside glimpse of the amount of work that goes into preparing for effective teaching. My first experiences with teaching were in the context of church, teaching Bible classes for younger children and leading VBS groups. I can recall meditating on James 3:1, as I prepared to teach for the first time. My eagerness to teach, was checked somewhat by a developing understanding that mishandling the subject matter could have lasting consequences. Those were meaningful early formative experiences. I overcame some insecurities and discovered new levels of comprehension from preparing not only to understand the material, myself, but in order to help others understand for themselves. These experiences were eye-opening and empowering, and I believe helped to set me on my current career course.

Clearly, the context of James 3:1 is not teaching quantum mechanics! On the other hand, I have grown to see there are lessons applicable to my job teaching physics. Playing a role in the professional preparation of my students is no small thing, and there are consequences to the students and my school if I do not perform at the top of my game. So, it is appropriate to commit myself each semester to grow in my ability to teach effectively. Like my early experiences, each time I commit myself to growing as a teacher, the reward I get from my classes–the relationships formed, the depth of understanding the material on a new level–grows as well.

Reflection on Early Challenges in Teaching

I admit that when I took my first teaching position, I did not envision the course I would most frequently teach would be a course for non-majors. However, it has turned out to be an important course in my development as a teacher. College Physics II is Lamar’s equivalent of ACU’s General Physics II. It is an algebra-based course taken primarily by pre-health professionals majoring in biology, biochemistry, or exercise science. At Lamar, most students take College Physics in their junior year. I learned quickly that the typical “College Physics” student is not enthusiastic about the course. For example, Lamar student evaluations included a response to “I had a strong desire to take this course,” to which most students rated College Physics below 3/5 on a 1-5 scale of “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” In the first few days of teaching, this created something of a chasm between myself–probably overly eager about my courses–and my new students. I clearly did not sufficiently appreciate this, as enrollment in my course dropped by at least one third in the day following my very first lecture! This was a difficult early lesson, but it had a scalpel-like ability to reveal quickly some gross deficiencies in my approach to teaching physics. On the one hand, I was clearly asking too much of my students (the course average was 65%, a full 10 points below my goal) and not connecting with them on the level I desired. On the other hand, I did not want to sacrifice course content or an appropriate level of difficulty. One of my first challenges was to try to find a way to connect with them, despite their distaste of the course, and find a way to draw them into the material, perhaps in some ways more subtlety than I initial planned.

I did not fully appreciate how much of a crutch mathematics had become to my lectures. Since College Physics is an algebra-based course, I could no longer appeal to calculus for justifying physical principles or analytical results. College Physics forced me to focus on conceptual justifications, instead. In hindsight, I am immensely grateful for this early challenge. As I prepped those early lectures, I quickly realized that in my own experience as a student, it was the conceptual rather than the mathematical aspect of courses that I found most challenging. Furthermore, it was in that critical aspect I felt my own preparation had been most lacking. This unexpected point of commonality gave me something of a bridge to my students. Improving the students’ abilities to reason quantitatively was still an important part of the course, but I learned to motivate it with the goal toward communicating the observed physical phenomena and reinforcing the conceptual elements that students found a bit easier to grasp. I made a concerted effort to point out ways that principles from our lessons manifested themselves in “the mundane” or in aspects every-day life. These found their way to in-class demonstrations or lab exercises that I still use to this day. Quantifying the success of curriculum development is admittedly difficult. However, I was reassured by a steady improvement in the course averages, e.g. from 65% to 75%, and in my course evaluations.

Realizing that I had pinpointed deficiencies in my own preparation as a physics major, I was able to bring the perspectives drawn from preparing College Physics to my preparation for upper-level courses within the major, as well. In this respect, the challenges presented by teaching College Physics proved invaluable to all of my courses. Since moving to ACU, I have taught courses predominantly for physics and engineering majors. Nevertheless, these lessons still prove valuable to me and continue to help me grow and improve as a teacher.

Courses Taught

In this section I provide a semester-by-semester list of courses taught. For the current semester, I embed links to the Canvas courses. In the following section on this page, I provide sample syllabi. More detail and reflection are provided in subsequent sections.

Fall 2015

PHYS 1402, “College Physics II,” algebra-based, second-semester introductory physics, e.g. for pre-health professionals (“General Physics” at ACU)
PHYS 1402 Lab, “College Physics II Laboratory” (two sections)

Spring 2016

PHYS 1402, “College Physics II” (two sections)
PHYS 1402 Lab, “College Physics II Laboratory” (two sections)
PHYS 4301, “Data Reduction,” special-topics course in data analysis, e.g. for physics, math, and engineering majors

Fall 2016

PHYS 1402, “College Physics II”
PHYS 1402 Lab, “College Physics II Laboratory” (two sections)
PHYS 4320, “Quantum Mechanics,” upper-level course, e.g. for physics majors

Spring 2017

PHYS 1402, “College Physics II” (two sections)
PHYS 1402 Lab, “College Physics II Laboratory” (two sections)

Fall 2017

PHYS 1402, “College Physics II”
PHYS 1402 Lab, “College Physics II Laboratory” (two sections)
PHYS 4320, “Quantum Mechanics”

Spring 2018

PHYS 1402, “College Physics II” (two sections)
PHYS 1402 Lab, “College Physics II Laboratory” (two sections)
PHYS 4301, “Data Reduction”

Fall 2018

PHYS 220, “Engineering Physics I,” calculus-based, first-semester introductory physics course, e.g. for engineering and physics majors
PHYS 221, “Engineering Physics I Laboratory”
PHYS 360, “Electricity and Magnetism,” upper-level course, e.g. for engineering and physics majors

Spring 2019

PHYS 220, “Engineering Physics I”
PHYS 221, “Engineering Physics I Laboratory”
PHYS 222, “Engineering Physics II,” calculus-based, second-semester introductory physics course, e.g. for engineering and physics majors

Fall 2019

PHYS 220, “Engineering Physics I”
PHYS 221, “Engineering Physics I Laboratory”
PHYS 222, “Engineering Physics II”
PHYS 371, “Classical Mechanics,” upper-level course, e.g. for engineering and physics majors