Experience Summary
I entered Virginia Tech as an honors math and physics student and graduated in three years with my BS in physics. At the moment I am trying to decide if I would like to go to grad school to continue on to something else, hopefully with math and physic as at least peripherally relevant.
I have never taught a class and have tutored in only in a limited capacity. I however was apart of Virginia Tech's first Physics education class and program and found that I really actually enjoy teaching for teaching's sake. I hope that my limited experience won't scare people away; I am very passionate about these subjects and I would enjoy building up my experience and resume so that I can become an even better educator.
Teaching Style
My major complaint with the current pedagogy of STEM fields is there focus on teaching students to be able to produce answers so a slew of canned and frankly uninteresting problem sets. There is so much interesting literature, philosophy, and history in the fields of science and physics that it makes very little sense to muddle with these less helpful and dull techniques and problems. Physics and math education has become so perforated with cliche that shows like Cosmos and the elegant universe can become hits by just regurgitating the same buzz-theories (Schrodinger's cat, Black holes, the multiverse etc.) in the same, cloddish language (space-time is 'warped' and twisted, quantum 'weirdness', etc). This lack of original language and analogy is not a semantical issue; it's suggestive of the philistine cleaving of the sciences from the arts and it's very disturbing -- these truly awesome theories that can shake our psychological cores the same way any form of art can. I would like to think that my teaching method strives to distill the logical necessity of these ideas so that when you are in class or taking a test you aren't concerned about having every minus sign or trig formula memorized and instead you are able to almost impusively attack problems through intuitive understanding.