Teaching

During my grad school, I either could be a TA (teaching assistant) or a RA (research assistant).  I chose the easier of the two routes (because I had heard so many of my grad student friends complaining about being slaves to the professor that they were RAs for).  The class that I was assigned to was circuits 1, which was one of my favorite classes.  I loved running the lab and grading the exams for that class.  I also was able to lecture a bit in each of the lab sessions on material that the professor had not had a chance to cover. It was great fun.  During that year, I fell in love with teaching.  Both my parents are teachers and the profession never had appealed to me until grad school.  

After Jared and I were married, the first job that I found was teaching a lab at SU.  Teaching a lower level lab is completely different than teaching a senior level lab.  The students actually want to learn in a senior level lab because it is part of their major. At SU, after dealing with students who were just there because they needed a lab science and had heard that this lab was the easiest, I quickly thought, maybe I do not enjoy teaching as much as I thought.

However, tonight I have decided that I do really enjoy teaching others (and it especially helps if you have good students who want to learn). I started teaching a circuits class again and I LOVE IT!! I miss Martin a little bit, but I love love love teaching this class. I am actually teaching the entire class, which is a first.