Chapter 39 : To Be a Teacher

Abstract:

The author sets some goals for himself at the start of every new academic year, which include: to make himself more accessible to his students and to make his office a place that students enjoy visiting and to give increased emphasis to active and collaborative learning. The process of learning science should model the methods practiced by scientists. The author attempts to serve all his students well while keeping an eye open for the exceptional; to encourage thinking, not recitation. The author plans to assign problems that challenge and exercise the minds of his students, not their capacity to memorize. He is convinced of the central position of teaching in the field of microbiology. Teaching is scholarship, not peripheral to it. As a microbiologist one owes his/her profession to one or more mentors who took an interest in them as developing scientists. The author considers it as great pleasure when his former students visit him and to find them excited about their work and to know that he had a part in their success.