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Teaching Philosophy

I believe that teaching is a very important and complex activity. The key to teaching is to establish an effective communication with the students by sustaining the students' interest on the subject matter. My teaching experience indicates that in order to maintain the students' interests one needs to achieve two goals:

    First, that the students perceive that the knowledge being discussed in class has an evident application.
    Second, that the students are able to follow the development of theories/models as a clear natural evolution of ideas.

Having achieved these two goals, I find that students tend to be enthusiastic towards studying continuously more complex ideas and problems, leading towards the successful completion of the course objectives and beyond.

Classes

I've taught Astronomy survey courses at UTPA (ASTR 1401 / 1402) from the Fall 2007 to the Fall 2009 semesters. In Fall 2008 I also taught "Seminar in Physics" (PHYS 4308) at UTPA.

This semester (Spring 2010) I'm teaching:

Study Astronomy and reach for the stars