Teaching

I like teaching students and I really enjoy their success. Since the beginning of my academic teacher career I direct my efforts to become a great teacher able to motivate, encourage, and enforce students to achieve their boldest achievement plans.

My decision to become educator was related to my scientific plans. I was enhanced by my leading professor to join PhD program. Now, after graduating two PhDs and few master degrees my extended knowledge can be passed to my students. As an experienced college educator, I believe in importance of continuous self development and improving modification approach, resulting in the best relation to my students and teaching results. Recently to support my teaching, I graduated two-semester methodological course for academic teachers. I keep my scientific knowledge up to date by reading scientific papers and books that are related to my teaching specialization fields. I attend various scientific conferences, seminars, and internal meetings to further my personal knowledge, and to interact with other experienced academic teachers and researchers.

A good teacher must know not only the teaching subjects, but also how to present it in order to help students absorb knowledge in a fast and effective way. As academic teacher I must have a deep awareness of how knowledge is created in the discipline, how it is organized, and how it is linked to other related fields. Students should know all relations of the subject they study to the science and outside academia job possibilities. I create online base where students can find materials additional to the official textbooks. In the class I expose my students to the merit of critical thinking, encourage them to analyze, apply, synthesize, and evaluate all the aspects of class gained knowledge, comprehension, and other experience. My class environment is motivated and competitive. My class sessions must be always good planned and highly effective. New technology methods help me checking for student understanding and involvement in a real time. Using  active learning techniques helps keeping students interested and engaged especially in large classes where often part of students stops participating because lack of teacher attention.  Because young people are constantly influenced by technology, using it can be crucial to modern educational strategies. I constantly adjust my class methods to students’ expectations and needs. I started using computers and my teaching style evaluated in this direction. It is expected from me, computational science specialist, to use my knowledge in my work not only for research but also for teaching. I personally developed mathematical and engineering software, and I present in the classroom how this software is related to the content of my courses. I use several visualization techniques for all major scientific computing subjects. I crated many convergence graphs. I created visualization of the solution for 1D, 2D, and 3D problems in OpenGL, VTK, Matlab/Octave, Mathematica etc. Also, I created several online visualizations in online web applications. I use visualizations in my lecture notes and presentations. For time dependent problems (for example, dynamics, heat transfer, diffusion, and computational fluid mechanics) it is convenient to use all kind of animations. By doing this I try to write in students’ mind the value of mathematics and computational science as applied in the real-world industry.

I challenge my students with the most difficult mathematical problems they can handle. I do not penalize them for their initial shortcomings with these advanced questions, but give them an opportunity for self improvement. My students are always treated equally, and supported in fight for the knowledge. My classroom environment is challenging but fair and giving the best conditions for the best personal achievements. My student approach is personalized and adjusted to students’ needs and expectations. Especially I do adjustments for international, special needs, and military students. However, any student in trouble can get my attention, consideration and help.

As a teacher of mathematics and computational science I aim to prepare my students for their future employment (in the industry, education or in academia).