Teaching

Courses

• ENVECON C176 Climate Change Economics
  Graduate Student Instructor (15-week term)

Teaching philosophy

Spark

By the time I started college, I’d decided I was done with math. I had gone through the motions of high-school algebra and trigonometry, and I’d pushed myself, largely because I knew no other way, through discrete mathematics and calculus, and by the end of it all, I remained unmoved. I failed to see the inherent beauty that others saw in numbers, or that I recognized in Keats or in the Calvin-Benson cycle. And so at age eighteen I decided that I’d never do anything in my life that required me to integrate or optimize anything, and that therefore I was done.

How wrong I was. A decade later, I entered a quantitatively demanding graduate program in Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, a program that forced me to learn (in most cases for the first time) differential equations, matrix algebra, box models, multivariate differentiation, spectral decomposition, and a large finite set of other methods. In one class in particular—Quantitative Aspects of Global Environmental Problems—my exuberant instructor not only expected basic knowledge of many of these techniques, but demanded that I cultivate an intuitive sense of which ones were best suited to addressing a particular problem. (“What’s the residence time of a cloud of mining runoff in a river of given dimension flowing at a given rate?” for example). The aim was to have a command of the tools required to quickly generate back-of-the-envelope estimates that could inform regulatory interventions and resource management decisions. It was not easy going, but for the first time in my life I wanted to learn these skills, to know how and why they worked, how they could fix things. I pursued further coursework in linear algebra and differential equations because I now understood how powerful these methods were, and how essential to the research I was beginning to undertake.

This is not the story of a struggling student whose teachers failed to reach him. I had effective math teachers, and I would put myself on the more enthusiastic end of the student spectrum. Nor is it the banal story of my failure to recognize math’s real-world applicability, which led to my dismissing it as irrelevant. (I subjected myself to a Master’s degree in political philosophy, after all.) The story is that until I was in my early thirties, math didn’t light a spark for me in the way that other disciplines did.

So why write in a teaching statement about the subject area with which I have grappled most? Precisely because my own struggles have helped me to better understand those of my students. Part of my role as an instructor—and this comprises a good part of my motivation to teach quantitative ecology and climate science at the university level—is to create the conditions for a spark to ignite as it finally did for me. I realize that all students are different, that they come to class carrying complex permutations of backgrounds, abilities, interests, and objectives. I know that some students will already have the spark, and that working with these people will inevitably energize me. But for many students, the spark will not have found them yet, whether because they’re coming to the subject for the first time, or because they’ve concluded they’ll never use the discipline’s tools, or because they’ve wrestled with it for too long already and have had enough. It is for this second batch of students that I teach, in the optimism that the spark will light for them in my classroom.