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Teaching Statement: Ramakrishna Varadarajan

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13 views3 pages

Teaching Statement: Ramakrishna Varadarajan

Uploaded by

atiyorockfan9017
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Ramakrishna Varadarajan

[email protected]
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ramkris/

Teaching Statement
I am highly motivated in applying for a faculty position in a University because I
thoroughly enjoy guiding, teaching & interacting with students and love working
as a Professor. My teaching statement is organized as follows. First, I briefly
explain the lessons learnt about teaching during my student years. Then, I briefly
explain my teaching experience thus far, followed by my teaching style and
methodology that I devised based on my experiences. Finally, I briefly list my
teaching interests.

Lessons learnt about teaching during my student years: As we all know,


every teacher was once a student and hence can easily understand student’s
expectations from a teacher. During all my student years, I had many chances to
meet some of the brilliant teachers and learn from them. Being a well-motivated
and attentive student, I always enjoyed and did well in classes where the teacher
was:
 Interested & Excited (about the course material) – Showed good interest
and excitement when teaching the course material.
 Open – Open to questions, clarifications and discussion.
 Interactive – Frequently quizzed the class during the lectures, to make it
more interactive.
 Appreciative – Recognized a student if he or she answered a question or
did well in a test, presentation or project.
 Unbiased and Fair – Fair and unbiased in grading (at least under my
perception).
 Reasonable – In setting goals, assignments, projects and exams.
 Accessible – Spends individual time with the students.
 Good in Oral Communication – Comfortably fluent in English.

It is interesting to note that, not all the above (but at least few) would be
applicable to a less-motivated or weaker student.

I managed to do well but didn’t enjoy classes where the teacher:


 Didn’t have good oral communication skills or had an accent that was
difficult to understand.
 Was not so excited or interested in teaching the course material.

When I was an undergrad student, I was more concerned about the grades, but
when I went to grad school, I was more concerned about learning and
understanding the course material deeply and exploring new areas.
My Teaching Experience & lessons learned: My teaching experience can be
traced back to when I served as a lab assistant for Operating Systems, Computer
Data Analysis, Introduction to Microcomputers and Computer Applications for
Business labs during the initial days of my graduate study in the School of
Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University. As a lab
assistant my job was to conduct weekly lab sessions, prepare lab assignments and
grade them. I had a chance to interact with the students individually and answer
the questions they had.

My in-classroom teaching experience started when I became a teaching


assistant for Data Structures and Principles of Database Management Systems.
My job was to offer review lectures (before exams), prepare and grade bi-weekly
assignments and also grade the midterm and final exams. This was my first
experience lecturing a class even though I had given talks before, in major
conferences. While helping students solve problems, I learnt new ways to solve a
problem which I didn’t think before. I also realized that being a teacher, I was
actually given a second chance to learn the course again, but in a much more
thorough way.

I had a complete experience of teaching a class when I was given a chance


to instruct an undergraduate programming course (Introduction to Programming
in Java). I taught a batch of forty undergraduate students, the preliminary course
in programming which was intended especially for IT majors. I offered weekly
lectures, constructed and maintained the class web page, prepared and graded bi-
weekly assignments (to make sure students get regular practice) in addition to
preparing and grading the midterm and final exams. Besides holding regular
office hours, I also allowed students to make individual appointments; this
ensured that they could seek for help whenever they needed it. When I found that
students lagged in their understanding of the course material, I stopped
progressing further with new material and conducted review sessions which gave
them a second chance (especially for weak students) to understand material
covered in previous classes. I also realized that a good teacher would concentrate
on the weaker or less-motivated students and this would improve the class on the
whole.

My Teaching Style and Methodology: Based on my teaching experience so


far, I have devised a methodology for effective teaching which I summarize as
follows:

 Teach-by-example: Examples usually bring a practical context in the subject


and grabs attention of the student. It also serves in clarifying certain
questions which would otherwise remain unanswered. For example, if I am
teaching a database class, I would work out the steps in creating a university
database after getting in agreement with the students about the database
requirements.
 Frequently test student’s understanding & progress: To make sure students
are on right track and get regular practice, I would give them biweekly
assignments and quizzes on the material covered in the past two weeks. I
understand that this could increase the grading overhead, but I believe it is
worth the effort and would improve the class.

 Concentrate on weaker and less-motivated students: I believe that the true


evaluation of a class’s success would take in to consideration how the weaker
students performed and not on how the top students did. As I mentioned
before, I would concentrate on the weaker or less-motivated students and this
would improve the class on the whole.

 Provide short review sessions once a month: I would frequently review key
concepts in different contexts so as to reinforce them in student minds.
Whenever I find students lagging in their understanding of the course
material, I would stop progressing further with new material and conduct
review sessions which would give them a second chance (especially for weak
students) to understand material covered in previous classes.

 Make the class more interactive: Students must be active participants in the
learning process, rather than passive observers. This is particularly important
for lecture courses.

 Teach Undergrad and Grad students differently: I believe that a different


teaching methodology is needed for the undergrad and grad students. While
undergrad students need to be monitored for their understanding of the
fundamental concepts, the grad students should be engaged in presenting
research papers, writing research surveys on a topic and possibly doing a
research project.

My Teaching Interests: My Teaching interests are in the areas of


 Database Managements systems,
 Data Structures,
 Programming,
 Graph Theory,
 Information Retrieval,
 Design and Analysis of Algorithms,
 Natural Language Processing and
 Data Mining.

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