My Teaching Philosophy

We live in the modern information age where any question can be answered by a few taps on a smartphone, but there’s a disconnect, I still see that most people don’t know that they are surrounded by the mysterious and magical world of science. Where each molecule of oxygen they breathe in is a miracle of how the electrostatic forces hold the electrons in place between the nuclei, how certain physical laws dictate that something so complex, like our DNA strands, can exist. My teaching philosophy is a simple one, to get my students excited about science like I get I excited about it. To be able to see, visualize and think about the laws of nature. To know how the ideas of physics control the chemical world and that in turn allows the biological world to exist!

I can talk about the importance of the hidden curriculum or Freire’s (1996) rather Orwellian views of modern pedagogy or about Bottery’s (1990) ideas on what schools should do but that’s not why I choose to teach science. I choose to teach science because I love talking about it, I love explaining how simple things around us can sometimes have very in-depth answers that took humans thousands of years to figure out. I want my students to be able to look at a piece of wood and think about the covalent bonds that holds those individual atoms together. I want them to see a florescent light bulb and know that electrons in there are getting energized and then de-energized and giving off photons in the process. I want them to appreciate the awe inspiring idea that the matter that makes us, us, has been around since the beginning of the universe. I want them to be able to fathom that half of the atoms that we see/touch/smell/taste were literally made when a star died.

That being said, we still live in a world where “teaching” and “learning” are assessed in examinations, I do not encourage my students to simply memorize, but rather understand “why” and “how” so they can answer the questions in a more meaningful way. As someone who took GCSEs and A-Levels as a student, I appreciate the value of exam-prep. And I do leave room in my schedule to do just that at the end of each chapter and then again at the completion of the syllabus.