Experience Summary
As a grad student I did a great deal of lab teaching and physics tutoring as part of my teaching assistantship. I also taught a semester of undergraduate astronomy at both the University of St. Thomas and at Normandale Community College near the end of my graduate school years.
I own an engineering consulting company (www.processdiscovery.com) that provides training, mentoring and consulting using Design of Experiments (DOE). Here my students are engineers and researchers.
In addition, I run a church-based program called the Alpha Course for 6 years. During those courses, and I lead and teach one of the small groups. The students are middle-age to older adults.
Teaching Style
Education has to be interactive to be effective. I try to apply a Socratic approach when I work with students - to not provide answers but to draw out answers from the student by directed questioning.
In the areas that I am competent in (physics into the undergraduate levels, and mathematics through the calculus level), I believe that understanding principles is what enables success. These fields require the development of physical and numerical intuition and pure memorization of facts is rarely successful. Such intuition is acquired through problem solving in conjunction with discussion of the topic.